An EERIE drone has captured a rare glimpse inside a war-torn European Championship stadium in Russian-controlled Ukrainian territory.
The Donbas Arena, the shining new jewel of Eastern Europe before Vladimir Putin’s forces devastated the region over the past decade.
Opened in 2009, the £320 million stadium in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk is home to national giants and reigning champions Shakhtar Donetsk.
The ghost pitch has already hosted Champions League matches and five Euro 2012 primary matches, two organisational matches for England and the semi-final between Portugal and eventual winners Spain.
It is one of eight venues used for the UEFA championships, jointly organised in Ukraine and Poland.
With a capacity of 52,000 people, it is the third largest stadium in the tournament.
But since 2014, the Donbas Arena has been inaccessible since Russian forces invaded the region.
New images taken by a Ukrainian drone at a war-torn stadium: eerie, empty and a fragment of its former glory.
The drone flies over the stadium and looks inside, where “Donetsk” is still written in huge white letters.
A mysterious white substance covers the dark, overgrown grass and the seats, which were once bright red, have turned gray.
The arena was heavily damaged by artillery shelling in August 2014 as Putin’s troops and pro-Russian separatists battled Ukrainian forces in the area.
By this point, the club had already moved out of its home, relocating more than 600 miles west to Lviv, far from the front line.
In October 2014, new artillery shelling bored holes in the stadium from east to west.
Fighting continued intermittently for years, making Shakhtar’s return dangerous.
Then the long abandoned stadium suffered further destruction when it was caught in the crossfires in March 2022 following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Russian state television shared photographs of shell craters a few meters from the stadium, as well as several damaged windows outside.
In June 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky marked a decade since the venue hosted the 2012 football extravaganza.
“Exactly 10 years ago, this day marked the start of Euro 2012, which brought together all Ukrainians, Poles and the vast majority of Europeans,” he said.
After a decade of war, it now sits in ruins, bombed and deserted, with damaged turnstiles and broken glass exteriors.
The lights have been out for years, the club shop is empty and the field is destroyed.
It is unlikely that the stadium will be used again, as Donetsk illegally claimed as part of Russia through Putin in September.
“It’s only been 10 years and I feel like I’m in the world,” Zelensky said.
“10 years ago our Donetsk was a strong, proud and evolved city. And then came Russia. Today the city that has lost the maximum of its inhabitants, thousands of lives and surely each and every prospect is a ghost. “
He also denounced rumors that the illegally appointed Russian government in Donbass was making plans to create a separate football league and use the stadium for this purpose.
The groups were to consist of players from the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic, the annexed Crimea and Georgia.
But for now, the deserts remain a chilling reminder of the fragility of peace in Europe.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, Mykolaiv’s Tsentralnyi Stadium has been deserted since 2021 and a Russian missile blew up much of it last year.
Another explosion from beyond is Ukraine’s 5,000-capacity Avanhard Stadium in Chernobyl, which was deserted after the power plant crisis in 1986.
The ground is now covered in a forest of trees and is barely recognisable after more than 30 years of neglect – the site was seized again by Russian forces in 2022.
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