By the time Lassina Traoré returned to his team, everybody else was gone.
In 2021, Traoré, a forward from Burkina Faso, had joined the other expensive foreign recruits lured to Ukraine by the country’s perennial soccer champion, Shakhtar Donetsk. Back then, Traoré played in a team built around a Brazilian core, supplemented by other foreign talent and some of Ukrainian soccer’s best players, for a club that was regarded as arguably the top team in Eastern Europe. Then the Russian bombs began to fall, and everything changed.
When Shakhtar returned to practice after a monthslong hiatus abroad, the cosmopolitan air of the club had vanished.