When Eliezer Sherbatov went to bed Wednesday night, he was preparing to play a hockey game the next day. When he woke up, it was war.
Posted at 1:36 p.m.
This 30-year-old Montrealer, born in Israel to parents of Russian origin who immigrated to Quebec when he was a baby, has been playing in professional leagues all over the planet for more than a decade. At the start of this season, this former QMJHL signed with HC Mariupol, in the Ukrainian Super League.
Although Mariupol, an important port city, is located in Donetsk Oblast, which Vladimir Putin recognized as independent earlier this week, there has been relative calm there in recent weeks, Sherbatov said. In interview at The Press, he is still impressed by how “extremely calm” the residents were under the circumstances. “It’s just to scare us,” he heard around him about the threat of an invasion.
With his team, he hit the road. Before their current destination, they played a game in Kyiv, a stop without a hitch. However, in the early morning, this Thursday, when the Russian president confirmed that an armed military deployment was beginning in Ukraine, everything had changed.
Following the recommendation of his teammates – all Russian or Ukrainian – Sherbatov preferred not to reveal the exact city where he is at the moment. Only that it is a few hundred kilometers from the Russian border and that artillery fire echoes in the distance.
At the end of the line, the sentences are short. The sighs, many. ” I am tired. I’m scared,” he says.
With his team, he is confined to the hotel, “in a safe place”, he specifies, until further notice. “It’s not like I can just grab my backpack and walk…”
The airspace above the country has been closed for several hours already, and images captured by local media show monster traffic jams on the highways of the largest centers.
With only his passport and 100 dollars in his pocket, he knows nothing of what awaits him, neither today nor after. All of his belongings remained in his apartment in Mariupol, where powerful explosions have been heard for the past few hours. He tried to contact the Canadian government, by phone and email, but as of 6:30 p.m. (local time), his calls for help had not yet been answered.
“I lost everything, I have nothing left,” he believes. At least he doesn’t have to worry about his wife and their children, who stayed in Montreal.
“I don’t care about hockey”
The match he was to play on Thursday evening was logically canceled. “Right now, I don’t care about hockey. It’s the least of my worries,” says Eliezer Sherbatov.
Despite his Russian roots, the present conflict has no particular resonance for him, he assures us. Wherever his career has taken him, from France to Kazakhstan, via Poland and today Ukraine, it is “to play hockey”.
The one who was the captain of the national team of Israel at the 2019 World Championship had also caused controversy in his native country, last season, by engaging with the club of Oswiecim, in the Polish championship. , city where the former Nazi camp of Auschwitz is located. While the Israeli press had reported on a “betrayal”, the principal concerned had replied, in an interview with Agence France-Presse: “It’s as if I was playing at the same time for the victims of the Holocaust . A Jew has returned and he will win for you. »
All of these considerations, however, fall far short of the current scale of its priorities. He tries as best he can to reassure those close to him – his father also said he was “very worried” in a short interview with The Press. And to keep a cool head, in the hope of receiving good news.
“You have to be brave,” he concludes.