As a player, Oleh Protassow scored goals on the assembly line for his hometown club Dnieper Dnepropetrovsk and was a member of the great USSR team for years, which caused a sensation on the football stages of the world under “General” Valery Lobanovsky in the late 1980s. For many pundits, that selection was the best team of the decade despite losing EURO 1988 to the Netherlands, thanks largely to Dynamo Kyiv players making up the lion’s share of the squad. Today, the 58-year-old is vice-president of the Ukrainian Football Association and is observing wartime behavior in his home country from his home in Kyiv.
