Less than five years ago, Eugene Katchalov was at a casino in the Czech Republic, playing a poker tournament with a top prize of more than €3m. It couldn’t have been much further removed from the situation facing the 41-year-old, Ukraine ’s most successful poker player, who was woken from his Kyiv home in the early hours of the morning on February 24 and left the city as Russia began its invasion.
Katchalov, who was born in Kyiv and raised in the United States, returned to the country of his birth “about five years ago” but was forced to drop everything and travel with his wife and their friends to the relative refuge of Budapest, Hungary.
Now, as the former poker heavyweight helps unite refugees with those offering homes in bordering countries, he tells Mirror Sport about his journey after witnessing scenes which he compared to being in Manhattan on the day of the September 11 attacks.
“Obviously the pressure was building, but up until the very end neither I nor any of my friends nor anyone I really knew actually thought a full on invasion would happen as is happening now,” Katchalov says.
“We kind of always thought the worst that can happen is some kind of terrorist attack in Kyiv. Obviously we thought there would be some fighting in the Donbas, but we thought the big cities should be relatively safe - nothing like tanks invading.
“I think all of my friends were there in 2014 [during the conflict in the Donbas] but this is something completely different,”
“Here, we're watching videos of tanks invading, of bombs dropped on civilian buildings, it's of a different level.
“When you're driving and seeing a mass of bombs go off in the distance and military airplanes and helicopters flying overhead, it's extremely unnerving.
“The only thing that comes close to it for me in terms of emotions is 9/11, because I was in Manhattan during 9/11, a few kilometres away, and I'd say that's the closest both in terms of my personal worrying and the fear on people's faces as to what's happening.”
Katchalov used Twitter to document his journey, first to the home of his friends’ parents in a village 35 kilometres outside Kyiv and then further west.
He tells Mirror Sport he decided to abandon his own car, a small sedan, with the group continuing their journey in three SUVs and even contemplating siphoning the gas from his own car to keep in case of emergency.
“A few weeks ago I agreed with my wife that we'd always keep a full tank of gas in our car and essentially gather the most important things we'd need to take with us - things like passports, wallets, credit cards, paperwork with marriage certificate, maybe some jewellery and some cash - so it's all in one place in case we needed to hurry out. So I'm pleased we were prepared for that,” he says.
He and his wife had been discussing theoretical plans with their friends the night before the invasion began, and after being woken up at around 5:30am it took them less than half an hour to gather their things and begin their journey west. The 35km journey to the friends’ parents’ place took about two-and-a-half hours instead of the usual 30-40 minutes, but he says things had got even worse by the time they reached the outskirts of the capital.
“It's good to travel as a group for a number of reasons, obviously being together helps but more practically it's more like say one car breaks down, you have to be ready to just leave the car behind and just jump into the other two cars,” he says.
“We didn't know what to expect - we were driving past military convoys, for all we knew they were going to attack right there, the road might explode in front of us, we just had to be ready to drop everything and go by foot if necessary.”
From there on out, the journey beyond the border was filled with uncertainty, and he remains grateful for being able to get out when he could as he hears stories of others still either forced to stay behind - Katchalov is a US citizen, but Ukrainian men aged 18-60 are not being allowed out of the country - or staying there out of choice.
His wife’s sister and parents arrived in Hungary later, after a three-day journey from Kharkiv in the east of Ukraine, while he knows of others who have been wracked with doubt and unsure whether or not they should leave.
“It was an extremely nerve-wracking journey, and a long one, but thankfully we made it,” he says.
“I thought the least I can do in my journey is to share my experience in real-time on Twitter and let people see inside my mind as to what's happening, because it's really difficult to appreciate just how scary it is, what's going on.”
Since arriving in Hungary, Katchalov has been working to unite refugees with people from 16 countries and counting who have offered their homes to those fleeing war - all manually, to begin with, though he says he has been put in contact with AirBnb after the firm pledged to provide temporary accommodation to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees .
On top of this, he and his company - esports-focused startup QLASH - have been working with the King Baudouin Foundation, helping establish an emergency response fund in an effort to raise money for number of NGOs across Europe with the goal of supporting Ukrainians inside the country and those seeking refuge elsewhere.
“Keep in mind, what I saw was one percent of what people are seeing now in Kyiv and across Ukraine - what I saw was scary enough, and I can't imagine what they're going through," Katchalov says.
"[It was] so terrifying and scary, and now that I'm in Europe and safe, you see people just going about their lives like everything's normal and it blows your mind.
“Until you literally fear for your life, you fear your life is in danger and you lose everything you've owned, you can't truly appreciate what someone can be going through.”
