Oleksandr Zinchenko can recall the one and only visit he made to the local cinema in his hometown of Radomyshl, two hours west of Kyiv.
The movie was Finding Nemo, the story of a child being separated from his family and having to fend for himself. The plot stuck with him because of the parallels with how he had to navigate a career that looked destined to fail and was only salvaged by going to a place he wishes he had not.
We know him as a four-time Premier League winner and former Ukrainian Footballer of the Year with 68 caps to his name, but the genesis of the Arsenal left-back’s professional career is a chapter that has remained opaque.
The visit of his former club Shakhtar Donetsk to the Emirates on Tuesday will be poignant given it is their first competitive match in England since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but it is against that backdrop his turbulent period between 16 and 18 can be revisited and reassessed.
It is part of the reason Zinchenko has written his forthcoming autobiography Believe (released on Thursday), which, with the permission of publisher Bloomsbury, we have used to inform this article. There are misconceptions he wishes to address and the Shakhtar match serves as the perfect entry point.
As his country’s foremost football figure, having spent eight years in the Premier League with Manchester City and Arsenal, the public have become used to Zinchenko assuming the mantle of spokesperson.
Alongside Andriy Shevchenko and president Volodymyr Zelensky, he led Game4Ukraine, a charity match held at Stamford Bridge that raised hundreds of millions of pounds. He has donated more than £1million ($1.3m) of his own money, stated he would return home to fight if conscripted and criticised former Russian team-mates for not publicly opposing the war.
He will view Tuesday’s match as an opportunity to remind the Western world that Ukraine still need their support to keep resisting Vladimir Putin’s forces, but his boldest intervention came last July at a press conference in New York when he forcefully lobbied Western governments to grant Ukraine access to F16 fighter jets.
It has won him the respect of Ukrainian fans, but the sentiment was not always so complimentary. Zinchenko left Shakhtar in 2014 amid a contract stand-off and moved to Russia to pursue a professional career.
British-Ukrainian Andrew Todos, founder of the Ukrainian football website Zoroya Londonsk, explains how the decision, months after Russia annexed Crimea and took control of the Donbas region, comprising the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, did not sit comfortably with some Ukrainian fans at the time.
“Zinchenko has never really focused on that part of his career,” he tells The Athletic.
“Whenever it has come up it has been a limited answer so this book will hopefully change the perception. When he made his Ukraine debut in 2015, some people were asking, ‘Who is this guy?’, as he played in Russia and there were rumours about him getting called up for Russia.
“Now he has become the player and person he is today, especially with the leadership he has shown the last two years. The majority understand it wasn’t his fault as he was just a young kid trying to make a career.
“Ukrainians really appreciate what he does in speaking out against Russia. He’s really articulate and has got the personality to do it. Bournemouth defender Illia Zabarnyi has done some bits but he has nowhere near the following of Zinchenko.”
A decade on, he is setting the record straight.
Zinchenko joined Shakhtar’s academy at 13 and was part of a gifted age group that won four successive academy league titles. Ten of that team went on to represent Ukraine at under-19 level.
It was a high success rate but there was to be no path into the first team at Shakhtar for Zinchenko. They saw him only as a player to be loaned out and potentially sold on.
This was months after Shakhtar had reached the last 16 of the Champions League. It was a team boosted by a strong Brazilian contingent, including Willian, Fernandinho and Douglas Costa, who had made them all-conquering domestically and a difficult side to break into for a young Ukrainian.
Zinchenko still had two years to run on his contract but the club were pressuring him to sign an extension that would protect his transfer value. He faced an ultimatum: sign or no longer train and play for the under-19 team.
They followed through with the threat. For the next four months, Zinchenko says he was ostracised and made to run solo laps of the field. He felt Shakhtar were making an example of him but he refused to bow to the pressure.
It did not change his overall situation. He remained in limbo and stopped being picked by Ukraine’s national sides, meaning he missed the Under-20 World Cup.
Zinchenko loved his time at Shakhtar with under-19s head coach Valeriy Kryventsov but he had to take matters into his own hands. He pestered the club analyst to create a file of his best clips and started to send it out to teams all across the world, hoping to attract interest that could extract him from this position. No escape route was forthcoming.
It coincided with Russia taking parts of eastern Ukraine by force, damaging Shakhtar’s stadium, which forced them to relocate 1,200km to Lviv. They were handing out Russian passports to citizens in Donetsk and proclaimed it as their territory following a ‘referendum’ that the Ukrainian state called a “farce”.
Zinchenko’s next move was to go to Russia. Writing now in his autobiography as a 27-year-old husband and father, he regrets the move.
His agent, Anatoliy Patuk, a friend of his step-father’s, had connections in Russia and felt it was his best chance of securing a professional club, so he took his advice and crossed the border. Zinchenko believed that any attempt to sign for another Ukrainian club would have been blocked by Shakhtar. He felt invisible and so he took a chance on the only place where he sensed a glimmer of hope.
In early 2015, he had one last roll of the dice. Ufa, a club located 1,000km east of Moscow in the Ural mountains that sit on the border between Europe and Asia, offered to take on Shakhtar. FIFA ruled on their side and a compensation figure of just €5,000 (£4,160, $5,430) secured his exit.
Zinchenko was unknown but made an immediate impression, and talk soon centred on the possibility of him gaining Russian citizenship. He could then free up a space for another foreign signing but Zinchenko never contemplated it.
The Ukrainian FA, however, had become aware of the conversation happening in Russian media and moved quickly to secure Zinchenko’s international allegiance, capping the 18-year-old in a Euro 2016 qualifier against Spain as an 88th-minute substitute.
He was not called up for the next four senior squads but played for the youth team. In March 2016, as he came out to train, his under-21s manager informed him that a decision had been made that no players based in Russia could play for Ukraine.
Zinchenko had been so single-minded in searching for any route possible into professional football that he had not considered how the political landscape could affect him.
This was the first time that the strength of feeling within Ukraine hit home. He had been shielded from Donetsk’s reality for almost two years while living in Russia but he now understood his international future relied on him finding a way out of Russia.
Two options appeared, one unlikelier than the other. Zenit Saint Petersburg and Manchester City wanted him. City had watched him in a youth game against Arsenal three years earlier and added him to the pool of players the emerging talent department was monitoring, which The Athletic is told automatically adds all teenagers to the database as soon as they pass a certain number of minutes. They had wondered where he had vanished to but when he reappeared on their radar at Ufa they resumed tracking.
Zenit offered much more money and had a plane waiting to whisk him off but Zinchenko did not care about wages. He wanted to fulfil his dream of playing in the Premier League but, above all, a move to England ensured he would be available to represent Ukraine.
Zinchenko now has 68 caps and has represented Ukraine at three European Championships.
There can be no ambiguity about his commitment but having never played senior club football in Ukraine and with almost five years of Covid-19 restrictions and war disruptions affecting crowds and venues, he has not been granted many opportunities to win over fans.
Tuesday offers a rare chance to connect with Ukraine supporters in a context not dominated by the spectre of war. Their Euro 2024 play-off match against Iceland in March was a powerful night of emotion as around 30,000 of Ukraine’s diaspora painted the stadium yellow.
That game took place in Wroclaw, Poland, another example of the nomadic reality many Shakhtar players have to experience for club and country.
Shakhtar have not played in their home stadium since Russia first invaded the Donbas in 2014. They moved to Lviv and then Kyiv but were displaced further in 2022, moving to neighbouring Poland before returning to Lviv last year.
That Shakhtar can still travel to London and compete in the Champions League, while fielding eight Ukraine internationals, is symbolic of their defiance. The country controls the vast majority of its territory two and a half years on from Russia’s invasion.
It can be exhausting to shoulder such responsibility on behalf of 38 million people, all while attempting to sustain an elite-level football career.
Zinchenko still loves Shakhtar and wants to return as manager one day. He has faced them twice in his career, both with Manchester City (a 6-0 home win in 2018 and a 3-0 away victory in 2019) but Tuesday will be emotional, even if he does not play.
He may be representing Arsenal, but when Shakhtar take to the pitch, Zinchenko will feel a sense of victory before a ball has been kicked.
Believe, Oleksandr Zinchenko’s autobiography, is released on Thursday
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Meech Robinson)
