On the morning after one of the heaviest aerial raids Kyiv has endured in several months, Rinat Akhmetov received a visitor at the end of a paved driveway half an hour from the city centre. At least 25 people are reported to have been killed, and those who emerged from a sleepless night were, as is so often noted in such circumstances, the fortunate ones. The owner of Shakhtar Donetsk, who rarely grants interviews and whose whereabouts have been widely speculated upon since Russia's full-scale invasion began, was present nonetheless — a fact that carries its own significance. The occasion was the 90th anniversary of a club whose recent history has been marked by a degree of disruption that appears to have no parallel in European football. Akhmetov, who is considered the wealthiest individual in Ukraine and among the most influential businesspeople in eastern Europe, has presided over Shakhtar for three decades. What began as a labour of love has become, in the years since Russia seized territory in Donbas in 2014, something closer to an act of resistance: the club was forced to abandon its home ground, the Donbas Arena, and has played its competitive fixtures as a kind of permanent exile ever since. Yet Shakhtar's fortunes on the pitch have remained a source of national pride. The club returned to the Champions League group stage and this season reached the semi-finals of the UEFA Conference League — a result that is widely seen as having kept Ukraine's situation in the European public's consciousness at a moment when fatigue with the conflict might otherwise have set in. Akhmetov acknowledged as much, arguing that the club had long maintained a distinctly Ukrainian identity, citing a decision in 2007 to render the club's name in Ukrainian script rather than its Russian equivalent. For Akhmetov, however, the journey is understood to have only one destination.…