In the first of a new series where players tell us their stories in their own words, Ukraine international Nicole Kozlova shares her story of football, war and the need to amplify the experiences of her people on the third anniversary of the commencement of war in her homeland.
''I grew up in Toronto, but I am proudly Ukrainian.
The year before I was born my parents and big brother moved to Canada, but once I entered the scene, they ensured I knew how important it was for me to know where I came from.
My mom's parents have always lived in Ukraine and when I was younger, we would visit them every couple of years, staying for a good amount of time each visit. I always remember working in the little grocery store that my grandpa owned, standing behind the counter helping him sell candies.
At home, we spoke the language and ate traditional foods—there couldn’t have been too many kids in Canada who grew up enjoying a bowl of borscht.
I guess it is important to acknowledge this, but when I was younger we only spoke Russian at home. There was no English spoken. My family grew up in Dnipro on the eastern side of Ukraine, near the border closest to Russia.
My parents were taught Russian at school and there was not much way around it, so growing up that’s what they spoke and then they passed that on to us.
Now we only speak Ukrainian in our household.
Football is my life.
I have a clear memory from when I was younger, searching for a boys' academy, knowing it would be the best place for me to develop. I was rejected. 'Girls cannot play with boys,' they told me.
Then came USC Academy. They took me in, and my coach, Isaac, taught me so much of what I know today. Half our team were girls, and we were the best in the league. As I got older and moved through different teams, an opportunity came to participate in a U-17 training camp with Ukraine.
I was only 16 years old but even then, it all made sense. It felt like it brought me closer to my parents and my family roots. Don’t get me wrong I will always be very thankful for what life in Canada has given me, but Ukraine is where my family's from and I knew this was the place for me to be.
There were football factors too. I knew I wanted to compete in Europe when I got older. That had always been in the back of my head and now I was getting the opportunity to play against top European countries. It was something I couldn’t give up.
I remember my very first call-up to the senior side, I was 18 then, standing and singing the national anthem. I was on the bench that day but as I sang, I felt my voice shake before tears started to swell in my eyes. In that moment, at my first senior camp, I knew—I was exactly where I needed to be.
I am so proud to represent Ukraine, especially now.
The day before the war began, I was travelling back from a national team camp in Türkiye. I was playing in Denmark at the time for HB Køge but most of my international teammates were still based in Ukraine.
It’s hard to remember the details because none of it felt real, but I went to bed that night and woke up and everything had changed.
The news was everywhere, and I immediately texted my dad, ‘’Has it started?’’
I already knew the answer.
My phone was blowing up—news, messages, everything. I couldn’t put it down. I think I was on it 24/7, reading, searching, trying to understand what was happening. Most of the squad at the time was heading back to Kharkiv, where the two strongest women’s teams were based.
Soon I would start to see messages from teammates who had returned to Ukraine, they hardly made it home before they had to pack their cars and flee. Trying to escape with traffic at a standstill, not knowing what was waiting as explosions rang around them.
The messages would keep coming, to this day I don’t really know what they felt and experienced. I will never truly know what it must have felt like to come home to destroyed buildings and absolute panic when days earlier life would have been carrying on as normal.
By this point, my family had moved back to Dnipro. But when the war began, they were stranded for months, living out of suitcases without a consistent home. They had come to see me play in Türkiye, with a flight back to Ukraine scheduled for a week later.
Looking back, as I sat in the safety of my apartment in Denmark I felt a lot of guilt.
Not that I wanted to be experiencing the war, but I felt it was unfair that teammates and friends were now in a circumstance where football was the last thing on their mind.
Just days earlier I had shared a football pitch with them and now they couldn’t be sure how they were going to live.
I think a lot of footballers say that when you step onto that pitch, it gives you an opportunity to put away everything that is going on in your life. In that moment I felt I had an extra duty when I played, to show how strong Ukrainians are, no matter what.
I wasn't fighting on the front lines, but I could show that fighting spirit on the field. At least that’s what I thought, but it didn’t feel enough.
I was staying in a little town called Køge where a lot of good people were organising ways to help. There would be clothing drives where me and a few teammates would go along to help out. I would go more often, organising donations and folding them into thousands of bundles. I would volunteer when I could and help raise funds.
I felt the pain, but I didn't really feel the pain in the way people directly impacted back home were. And so it was always about figuring out the best way I could do something, anything to help.
When I was playing football I felt that responsibility too.
The national team’s first game back after it all began would be played against Scotland, where I now currently play my football for Glasgow City. The game didn’t take place in Ukraine though, but in the Polish town of Rzeszów near the Ukrainian border.
From the months of February to June there were no official camps or games so that first camp back was the first time many of us had come together.
We had all experienced the war differently. Many of the girls had family members on the front line or families living in occupied territories who had homes destroyed.
Most of the squad had found ways to keep playing but this game was beyond football. Obviously, football was on our mind, we always wanted to play well when we represent our country, but it was just the fact that we were all together again.
Different teams have different locker room vibes. With my national team we usually have a calm, chilled vibe, but this one was different.
In the changing room before kick-off the starting eleven, which I was part of, were wrapped in Ukranian flags before someone hit play on ‘’воїни світла’’ (translated as Warriors of Light) a very patriotic song.
Everybody sang it with their whole heart.
We were saying that no matter what’s going to happen on this pitch we’re representing Ukraine. After four months of no football this is going to be special. It was a moment I will remember for the rest of my life.
We lost 4-0, the effects of not playing together for so long meant we never got into it. Of course, you never want to lose that heavily but for all of us that game meant so much more than just football.
After two seasons in Denmark, I decided to move to Vorskla Poltava, then champions of Ukraine. They were coached by a former national team coach so football wise I knew I was going to be taken care of.
It would be a move that would allow me to be closer to my family, with Dnipro three hours away, and I also hoped it could be an opportunity to help get the women’s game in Ukraine back on its feet. To share the story of what was happening to a wider audience.
Now this is hard to explain, but part of me felt like I needed to experience the war to truly understand it. I’m definitely not saying I was happy about it—nobody should ever be happy about war. But until you feel that first explosion, it’s like you can’t fully grasp what it means. It just doesn’t click in your head. Think about it—when have you ever heard an actual missile explode? I hadn’t, not until I went to Ukraine.
It's not a normal thing. But when you do hear that first one and your apartment shakes, it really hits you. I wouldn’t recommend it.
Air raid sirens would become a part of everyday life. They were frequent, so it was unrealistic to head to the bomb shelter each time and to be honest most things that landed hit before there has even been a chance for the alarm to be sounded.
There were times when I’d hear a siren and just stay in my apartment, or I’d be out walking and hear an explosion. Did it scare me? Absolutely. But you learn to push through it; you just keep going because that’s all you can do. I remember one time I was on my way to a friend’s house, and I heard an explosion. You get scared and then you just keep walking, it’s all you can do.
You carry those experiences with you too. Now that I'm living in Glasgow, I had my first Bonfire Night, and let me tell you, I didn't sleep at all. Fireworks are usually fine, but this night, a few loud bangs went off really close by. It sounded just like a missile hitting, and it instantly took me back to all the civilian buildings targeted, the lives lost, and homes destroyed.
It opened my eyes to being a little bit more aware of what others might be experiencing.
That need to just keep going also rang true when it came to football.
Training would be carried out to the regular background noise of air raid sirens and so it was rarely paused. But at games it was different as they were seen as official events.
Basically, any time there was a siren the game would have to stop. You’d go inside to a bomb shelter and wait until it was over, but this is not something that could happen just once. Games could be stopped countless times and the breaks came with no set length. A ninety-minute game of football could realistically last for hours.
Games would be scheduled for 11 in the morning. Partly because we thought there'd be less sirens at that time but also to ensure we had enough time to complete a game in a day.
It took a toll on your body not only physically but mentally too.
The siren wails and any momentum that was happening in a game, it's over, like, it's a scratch. Then momentum builds again and, bam, another air siren, back inside you go.
It was a very weird way of playing football, but nobody complained.
The other big challenge was travel. Ukraine is massive, much bigger than people think, and during a war you obviously can't fly around the country, so it would be bus rides.
Five, ten, fifteen-hour trips, if I’m honest it was something I never got used to, but you just had to deal with. We stuffed our little bus with mattresses and did our best to make it feel like home.
But that wasn’t just for domestic games, that also applied for Champions League too. Victory after a 35-hour one-way trip to Bosnia was rewarded with a 24-hour trip to Rome. It’s one of those unseen elements that goes into keeping women’s football going in Ukraine just now.
Internationally we haven’t played a home game since 2021 and the locations where we do play at ‘home’ are not consistent. Türkiye probably feels most like home just because we do go there most often. But our matches change depending on who we're playing.
Before the war I flew to Kyiv so much that I remember joking that my passport had four pages of stamps for one airport. Now all I want is just one stamp from that exact same place, but who knows when that will happen.
Simply put, it sucks that we can’t play at home, that young girls in Ukraine aren’t getting the opportunity to see what they could become. There were lots of plans to grow the women’s game but understandably they’ve had to be put on pause. Despite that we are all still pushing to grow the game.
But there is no escaping that playing football in the park can be life-threatening; I saw a report where a Russian missile hit a local field, killing young boys who were just kicking a ball, looking for peace the way we all do. War today is still a very real thing.
But as Ukrainians we just keep going. My mom told me a story from when she was at the grocery store and a very loud explosion happened close by. Thankfully it hit a new building that was lying empty, but in the store, people panicked, rushed out or tried to find the closest bomb shelter.
My mom just kept on shopping with my little brother who was only four at the time, when I asked her why she just carried on as normal instead of joining the flee, ‘’Well the bomb had already landed, what else could it do.’’
I do think what is still going on in Ukraine gets forgotten about. It still obviously spikes in the news every now and again, but I know that even I'm not reading as much as I was at the beginning. But that's just because in my life, it's become so normal.
That’s how news works I suppose. Something is hot, hot, hot and then it just disappears but it’s important that this conversation continues, I take a huge personal responsibility for that.
Sometimes when I'm sharing something on Instagram, I think, ‘’oh, people are probably like, oh, she's posting again about Ukraine.’’
In my head I feel like I'm constantly posting about Ukraine, but people aren't seeing what is happening if I don't post it. It’s probably worse now than it was in the first couple years, it’s just not being talked about as much.
I saw explosions. Walked past burning buildings as fire trucks were trying to put the fire out and rescue the kids, the families, the civilians. I've seen drones fly overhead.
When we trained in the winter it was right next to a Ukrainian army base. We’d see helicopters fly by, and every time I did, I just hoped they’d come back with everyone inside alive. People need to know that war is real and to be unafraid to have hard conversations.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like them, but I understand the importance of having them, to help educate people about what our country is going through.
I don’t have all the answers, but I have one hope, one dream: for the war to end and for our country to be free.
I'm just Nicole, a Ukrainian football player trying to do what I can to shed a light on our story.''