“I left between bombs, tanks and war planes flying over us”

The Portuguese Nélson Monte, who has arrived at Almería to play until the end of the season from the Ukrainian Dnipro, said this Wednesday that when he looked “out the window, there was a tank in front” of his room, referring to the odyssey of his departure from the city in which he has lived since last September.

“It was crazy because I was in Turkey, I arrived in Ukraine and at one in the afternoon the news came out that they had canceled the championship for thirty days,” the Portuguese defender told the Almeria club’s media, who, after requesting permission to leave Dnipro, “at night bombs began to fall”.

“I was sleeping and I heard a very loud noise that I didn’t understand. When I open the window, I see another bomb and I say to myself: the war has begun. I get in my car with two Spaniards and a Brazilian and we start driving,” she recalled.

Monte said that during the journey, which meant having to drive for 28 hours, they received a proposal from the president of the Ukrainian club to rest in a hotel owned by the president, but he pointed out that everything was chaotic and that on that road to look for a border country he felt “fear, so much fear”.

“When we drove about 28 hours straight to get to the border, from Dnipro, we saw a lot of tanks. We wanted to go to Lviv (Lviv) and then to Poland, but when we were on the way they told us not to go to Lviv, that it was being attacked and we turned everything around to go to Romania”, he recounted.

Nélson spoke of the terror of the continuous war scenes, with “many planes passing over, the sirens playing in the cities.”

Like many Westerners, he says he does not understand anything about the conflict and that he only knows “that the people of Ukraine do not deserve this because there are very good people: women, men and children…” “These are things that I will remember all my life,” he stressed. .

“Children who arrived with their parents at the border, they gave a kiss to their children who left with their mothers and the parents returned to Ukraine to fight,” added the Portuguese defender.

The Portuguese centre-back, who compared what he experienced to something out of a movie and who has welcomed Ukrainians into his home in Portugal, assured: “It hurts a lot, my heart hurts, because there are children of all ages and you don’t know if you have a father tomorrow ”