Euro 2012 left little mark on Ukraine, still haunted by its history

Few major tournaments can have felt so irrelevant to their time and place as the last European Championship and the potential fault lines in Ukraine were apparent to those who cared to look

The Donbass Arena, built with several hundred million of an oligarch’s dollars, was as striking a modern setting for a football match as could be imagined. A shortish walk from the centre of Donetsk, it invited fans to get there early and join the families and couples enjoying a picnic or an ice cream in the sunshine on the carefully landscaped grassy knoll overlooking the sparkling new home of Shakhtar, the oligarch’s club, and the lake that lay beyond it.

On a fine summer’s day, such as that on which Italy and Germany confronted each other for a place in the Euro 2012 final, it felt like heaven. A reminder that there was also a hell close at hand came on the other side of the arena, nearer to the lake, in the shape of a 100ft-high statue of a soldier and a miner. One holding a sword and the other a flag, cast in black copper in the Soviet realist style and resting on a black granite base, the figures commemorated the liberation of the city from Nazi occupation in July 1943. A few yards away stood a display of Red Army tanks and field guns.

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source Sport | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1vegkA8