Ukraine's diverse fans in Germany include a Kozak from Baltimore

BERLIN - An article featured in The Moscow Times on June 26 highlighted two Team Ukraine fans from two different parts of the world.

Roman Hnatyshyn from Baltimore, dressed in a white shirt and baggy trousers, his face adorned with blue and yellow paint, a bowl haircut with a bushy mustache and a big smile said, "This is a traditional Kozak costume."

The Baltimore native admitted he wasn't a big soccer fan, but said he and other second-generation Ukrainian Americans had been waiting for the World Cup for a long time. Mr. Hnatyshyn was among the hundreds of sons, daughters and grandchildren of Ukrainian émigrés who have made the trip from the United States, Britain and Australia to support their motherland at the world's premier sporting event.

A group of fans from the Donbas challenged the ethnic Ukrainians, calling them fascists and asking why they didn't speak Russian.

"It's traditional dress," said Wolodymyr Hnhew, a Ukrainian fan from Coventry, England, insisting that it was not a nationalist symbol. "I haven't come here for politics," he added.

Russian is the soccer lingua franca in Ukraine and the repression of the Ukrainian language in the Soviet times meant it failed to develop a soccer vocabulary, said Savik Shuster, host of the Ukrainian World Cup chat show "Trety Taim" or "The Third Half." It was only recently that matches started to have Ukrainian commentary - "but it sounds awkward," he commented, according to The Moscow Times.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, July 2, 2006, No. 27, Vol. LXXIV

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