At the dawn of this 2024-2025 season, Diana Meliushkyna had not considered leaving her club SK Prometey, in central Ukraine, and even less her country. “But the club went bankrupt, so we had to find a new base,” she concedes. Without a contract at the end of the transfer window, there were not many offers on the table. Quimper Volley 29, then in the midst of a squad overhaul, jumped at the opportunity to sign the 28-year-old Ukrainian international.
“When the alarm sounded…”
Diana Meliushkyna therefore flew to Finistère in September for her first sporting experience abroad. She left behind a championship disrupted for two and a half years by the war. “We continued to play because most of the matches took place far from the conflict zones. But it happened several times that a meeting was interrupted. When the alarm sounded because the place was bombed, we left the room to take refuge,” recalls the player.
You get used to everything, to the sounds of bombs and the constant threat. And all the players quickly sought to stay positive.
Diana Meliushkyna recounts all this with the astonishing relaxation of a woman who has finally gotten used to the sounds of bombs and the constant threat. “You get used to everything,” she asks. “And all the players quickly tried to stay positive. »
She also found this state of mind when she joined the ranks of the Ukrainian selection. Together, the players seek to escape from this heavy context, and to bring smiles back to the supporters who follow them. “We don't think about the situation when we play. We simply seek to convey to the people who look at us a different emotion,” insists Diana Meliushkyna.
Accompanied by her mother
In Quimper, the player came with her granddaughter of one year and nine months, but without her husband, forced by the war and his role as statistician in a Ukrainian Volleyball club to stay in the country. “He misses his father of course. And it is also for her that we must not give in to panic over the situation in Ukraine. I don’t want to pass on my stress to him,” she says.
At the end of Brittany, the player can however count on the support of her mother, who has come to settle in the area to help her daughter in her first experience away from home. Diana Meliushkyna and her child feel good in Quimper, in this city “neither too small nor too big”. But the center, inhabited by this desire to live in the present moment without thinking about the future, avoids projecting too much for the moment. “If I have the opportunity to play in Italy or Turkey, two of the best championships in the world, I think I would leave,” she warns. In the meantime, she has a whole season to help Quimper Volley 29 ensure its continued existence among the elite.
France
Volleyball
