LVIV, Ukraine -- As the ball strikes the back of the goal, the crowd erupts. But not with its usual flare.
There are no fireworks, no orange smoke. No anthems are sung.
In this 35,000-seat stadium on March 14, the mere 2,000 people who are here to watch the Donetsk derby between Shakhtar and Olimpik casually rise and applaud. A group of a couple hundred young students let out screams, but no synchronized chants.
Shakhtar's hard-core fans, known as "Ultras," the rowdy, shirtless and sometimes mask-clad crew of young men who typically travel everywhere with the team are noticeably absent.
That's because this match is taking place not on the team's home field in war-torn eastern Donetsk, but 700 miles west in Lviv, near the border with Poland.
No aspect of life has gone untouched by the war in Ukraine's east -- not even soccer.
The violence there has displaced more than a million people from the region, and hundreds of thousands from Donetsk itself. Some have fled east to Russia, while a majority relocated to the government-controlled territory further west.
Soccer teams from Donetsk, Luhansk and Mariupol have also been dislodged and relocated due to intense fighting there.
"Almost half of all teams [in Ukraine] don't have home arenas, in other words they don't have home games," says Vitaliy Krutyakov, a journalist for Ukraine's Football 1 and 2 channels.
Shakhtar is among them. Today, refugees in their own right, they're living and practicing in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, and traveling to and from Lviv to play home matches.
Shakhtar Donetsk, arguably Ukraine's greatest football club of present day -- some would argue of all-time -- hasn't played on its home field in Donetsk since May 2 last year.
The team has won Ukraine's Premier League Championship the past five years, and competes in European competitions, including the UEFA Champions League. In 2009, the squad won the UEFA Cup, becoming only the second Ukrainian team ever to do so.
Shakhtar's budget is the biggest, and its stadium, the $425 million Donbass Arena, is perhaps the best in the country, thanks to its billionaire owner and the country's richest man, Rinat Akhmetov. The team's legendary coach, 69-year-old Romanian Mircea Lucescu, is a serial winner; its ultras are devout worshipers.
Those things, as well as the club's recent success, has attracted the attention of international players as far away as Brazil who outnumber local talent on its roster 2-1.
On the heels of its fifth-consecutive league title a year ago, Shakhtar, whose name translates from Ukrainian as "Miners" -- after the men who worked the fields upon which the team was founded in 1936 -- was poised to become one of best clubs in Europe and a challenger for the EUFA Champions League Cup.
And then war erupted in Ukraine's east, and Donetsk transformed from a bustling million-person metropolis of swanky cafes and glistening high-rises alongside old Soviet blocs to the embattled epicenter of fighting between Kiev's government forces and Russia-backed separatists.
Instead of soccer matches, Donbass Arena now hosts humanitarian aid workers who dole out much-needed food to hungry civilians caught in the crossfire of the conflict that has killed more than 6,000 people since it began last April. Shockwaves from a rocket strike in the city blasted out several of the sleek stadium's windows in October of last year, barely missing a lucky young girl walking beneath them.
Beyonce performed at its opening back in 2009.
Shakhtar Donetsk's future is now as uncertain as the outcome of the conflict itself.
"If you look at the history of football, I don't think you'll find this kind of situation where a team played one year or two years outside of their home and still continued to participate in the [Champions League]," Sergei Palkin, Shakhtar's CEO, told Mashable inside the marbled Opera Hotel in Kiev, where the team and its administrative staff have taken up temporary residence. Akhmetov, the club's owner, also owns the hotel.
"When you don't have a home, it's very hard," he says. "You can do it one or two months. But when it's for more than a year, it's very hard to survive in this situation."
Lviv is strikingly different from Russian-speaking Donetsk in every way. A rich, centuries-long history that saw it change hands between the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland and Ukraine left a remarkable mix of architectural styles. In Donetsk, it's mostly Stalin-era blocs all around, with a splattering of unimaginative high-rise glass business centers.
The city is distinctively pro-Western, and Ukrainian -- not Russian -- is the predominant language. Almost every family here has sent someone to the front lines on the conflict in the east. Hundreds of them -- maybe thousands -- never returned from the battlefields.
Fundraising for the Ukrainian army in western #Lviv. Assortment of handicrafts sold to raise $ for handmade uniforms. pic.twitter.com/tBV8qTEh4u— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) March 15, 2015
The sense of patriotism in Lviv is evident everywhere -- from underground speakeasies whose call-and-response password system is "Glory to Ukraine!" "Glory to heroes!" to the handicrafts sold at market by volunteers to raise money for the war effort. Blue and yellow national flags wave from nearly every building, often times alongside the red and black -- "blood and soil" -- flag of the more radical nationalists.
And so it came as no surprise when some locals met Shakhtar Donetsk's arrival last fall in Lviv with some hostility, hanging signs from its new home field, the 35,000-seat Lviv Arena built for Euro 2012, that read: "Get out of Lviv!"
Things seem to have mellowed since.
Taras, a Lviv Karpaty ultra, & his 1969 VW. He's cool with Shakhtar Donetsk playing in Lviv. "All ultras are united." pic.twitter.com/0tXojhdXHp— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) March 15, 2015
"Politicians always pit people against each other in Ukraine, saying east and west are absolutely different, saying in the east they don't like people from the west and vice versa, in the west they don't like Russian speaking people from the east ... Fans all around Ukraine, in spite of what city they're from support each other and Ukraine, and are truly patriots of our land," says Taras Pavliv, a leader of the Karpaty Ultras -- the super fans of Lviv's soccer club.
Palkin, Shakhtar's CEO, agrees that Lviv has been supportive. But he says filling the stadium has been a challenge.
"Our fans are like the 12th player on the pitch," Palkin says.
Ruslan, a leader of the Shakhtar Donetsk Ultras who, like the team, fled Donetsk after facing persecution from the local pro-Russian crowd, says it has become increasingly difficult to organize the fans, who, after leaving their homes, spilled across the country.
"We are the team from Donetsk, which lives in Kyiv and plays it's home matches in Lviv. "It's a paradox," he says. "And it's uncomfortable."
Despite the poor attendance at the March 14 match, Shakhtar pulled off an easy victory in the Donetsk derby, defeating Olimpik 6-0.
But it wasn't much of a challenge. Olimpik only this year was bumped up to Ukraine's Premier League to fill a void after Russia annexed Crimea last March, taking the peninsula's top teams with it.
"I never thought we'd have to leave our home. Nobody thought the war would force us out," says 26-year-old Shakhtar goalkeeper Anton Kanibolotskiy, sitting on a plush gold sofa inside a Kiev hotel two days after the match in Lviv some 430 miles away from the eastern city of Donetsk, where he is unable to return.
This may be Kiev, but reminders of what's happening in Donetsk are omnipresent. News of the death and destruction there are splashed across television programs. Billboard displays calls for men to join the ranks of the army and national guard to fight the separatist insurgency in the east.
The thought that Shakhtar might not be able to go back never crossed Kanibolotskiy's mind last May, after the club went on vacation at the end of the season.
But as the conflict reached its peak last summer and rockets rained death down upon Donetsk, he accepted the fact that he and his team "might never go home."
"We all believe and hope that peace will come and we'll be able to return to Donetsk, to our stadium, our fans," he says.
But even with a fragile cease-fire agreed by the warring sides, it is unlikely they will go back soon. The truce doesn't begin to address the underlying issues between Ukraine and Russia and the separatists it backs. A win for anyone is still a long way off.
Additional reporting by Natalie Gryvnyak