The Ukrainian cricketers who ditched their bats to save their country

One evening during the most brutal early days of Russia’s invasion, a young sniper in Ukraine’s armed forces sends a late-night text.

Oleksandr Romanenko, fighting on the front lines in the eastern Donbas region, relays stories from the war zones of Bakhmut, of coming face-to-face with Wagner mercenaries and from the counteroffensive in Russia’s Belgorod. But, of all things, he has cricket on his mind.

Oleksandr Romanenko in full flight.

“As strange as it sounds, what I want to be doing most of all right now is playing cricket,” Romanenko, then 29, texts. “But I have a sniper’s rifle in my hands right now instead of a bat, and a grenade instead of a ball.”

Known to his friends in his rural hometown outside Kyiv as “Sasha”, Romanenko was, before the war, regarded as one of Ukraine’s best home-grown cricketers. Stylish batter, athletic wicketkeeper.

In early 2022, Ukraine was poised to become the world’s newest national team, its application to join the International Cricket Council as an associate member having been all but accepted.

But come that February, instead of preparing to host international cricket in Kyiv and Kharkiv, those cities were being hit by Russian missiles. It’s when many of Ukraine’s aspiring cricketers were really put to the test.

Oleksandr Romanenko on the frontline in 2023.

Romanenko is still fighting on the frontline for his nation’s survival, and cricket has all but disappeared from the sporting fields of Ukraine’s cities and towns.

One of the men who helped promote and grow the game there is Wayne Zschech, an Australian who landed in Ukraine from Hervey Bay in 1993, just shy of his 18th birthday.

Zschech had been intending to return to Australia to join the Air Force after a gap year in his ancestral home, but instead found his calling as an evangelical pastor in Kaharlyk, a small town south of Kyiv.

It’s there he taught the game to the members of his congregation and then the wider community. Romanenko was one of them. By 2020, 2000 Ukrainians were playing regular cricket along with migrants from the subcontinent as well as a handful of Brits, South Africans and Australians.

Pastor Wayne Zschech, left, and Yuri Zahurskiy are batting partners at Kaharlyk CC.

But the school field Zschech leased in Kaharlyk is no longer used for cricket. Instead, he is still bringing his community together in other ways, hosting and raising funds for displaced families who are staying at his Calvary Chapel church.

Romanenko and Zschech are just two of the fascinating characters in a new book by British author Jonathan Campion, Getting Out: The Ukrainian Cricket Team’s Last Stand on the Front Lines of War. A translator of Russian and Ukrainian, Campion has travelled and worked in Eurasia since 2005.

Campion said he wanted to blend the history of the game in Ukraine with eyewitness accounts of the start of the war with Russia, capturing both heartening and sad stories.

“I wrote it, like first and foremost as a sporting book, to be on sports shelves to be read by cricket fans,” Campion says. “So I did try and keep a balance between the kind of the quirky, really positive inspiring cricketing stories that I hope cricket fans will really enjoy, but also to go a bit further and talk about what these guys were doing when the war began.”

A match at Hardeep Singh’s cricket oval in Kharkiv before the Russian invasion.

The father of modern-day cricket in Ukraine is Hardeep Singh, an Indian businessman who brought the game to the country’s second-biggest city, Kharkiv in 1993. Singh was so impressed by the quality of his education in Kharkiv that he set up a business, Bobtrade, to facilitate the arrival of other Indian students.

Located just 30 kilometres south of the border, the predominantly Russian-speaking city is a major cultural and education hub, which was a major target for Moscow early in the invasion.

After first arranging social matches in local parks, where he and other expats from India could stave off homesickness, he went on to create a cricket league with several teams.

Cricket’s popularity also spread to private schools across the country; by the end of the 2010s, it was a staple of many PE classes.

By then, Singh was making plans to build an international-standard ground. The land he ended up buying used to belong to a rugby union team.

When Kharkiv came under fire in February 2024, Singh, through his cricket network, would eventually help evacuate hundreds of Indian students out of the city. As Russian tanks drove through the city’s streets, Singh sent instructions to them to switch off all the lights in a student accommodation building when it became clear that Putin’s forces were targeting places where ordinary civilians lived.

Singh and his family fled to Dubai but have vowed to return to the city when the war is over.

Author Jonathan Campion.

Despite Singh’s huge promotion of cricket in Kharkiv, Campion said the game didn’t really take off in the country until local Ukrainians became involved. And it was the Australian pastor, Zschech, who played a pivotal role with the team that he captained, Kaharlyk CC.

Practising in a barn, Zschech’s friend Yuri Zahurskiy became a big-hitting batter and an off-spin bowler. While Russian soldiers were carrying out massacres in Bucha in March 2022, Zahurskiy repeatedly drove into the besieged town in an old Toyota and took dozens of children to safety.

Campion says he was struck at the way Ukraine’s cricketers, such as Romanenko, think about cricket the same way an amateur player in England or Australia would.

“There was no difference in how he thought about the game to how we do so, he was planning his week around it, you know, skipping university lectures to go and play cricket. Missing dates with his girlfriend to go and play cricket,” he said.

“But then when the invasion began, like 14 million other Ukrainians, everything else that he was at that point just stopped existing. He was suddenly a soldier, had a rifle thrust into his hands and was quickly learning how to use it.”

Campion hopes he’s wrong, but he thinks cricket might be finished in Ukraine. But he does dream of a day when some of the country’s best players could put down their weapons and pick up a bat and ball again in a charity match.

“The war will have to end first and let’s pray, it’s a couple of years, not longer,” he says. “I think about if things had been different, and the war hadn’t happened. Some of these guys could have become international cricketers. They could be playing in kind of ICC World Cup qualifying events. The cricket world might know about them in some way.”

Getting Out: The Ukrainian Cricket Team’s Last Stand on the Front Lines of War, by Jonathan Campion, published by Pitch Publishing. RRP $34.71

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.