Leinster backrow Alexi Soroka taking it one day at a time: ‘Proud to be a Ukrainian and proud to be Irish’

He holds a little finger in the air. Largely straight, the middle is buckled and swollen.

“Jacked up,” says the Leinster backrow. “Taped it up. Put a hurling glove on it. Back to my Ga days.”

Now more than ever, Alexi Soroka is pulling together his rugby and coming to terms with a world knocked off its axis. The protective glove is part of his past, one of the bits and pieces of growing up in Ireland, the green side to his Ukraine blue and yellow surname.

At 6ft 5in and more than 104kg, Soroka, with great locks of dark hair dwarfs everyone around him and quickly warms to retelling a story his mother told him. Before settling in Dublin, she went to Cork because baby Alexi inside was enormous.

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She was told that a hospital there was the place to go because of the size of her boy and their laser surgery. Getting her baby out was no laughing matter.

“I was the biggest baby ever in the hospital,” he says. “Thirteen pounds, about six and a half kilos.

“I was huge when I was a kid. Then when I went to secondary school, I got small again. Everyone caught up. My da always put me in teams above. Guys were always bigger than me. So, it was easier to play in my age grade when I got there. It was a good bit of foresight from him I guess.”

The bonny baby is back playing again, a mending broken finger the latest triumph over adversity after 12 months where, between his rugby and family, certainties became uncertain and ordinary lives unfathomably bleak.

Those months have been alternating shifts of missing out and looking on. The looking on has been more difficult than the missing out. The missing out can be retrieved and back healthy again playing rugby he is regaining lost weeks.

The looking on, well five days before his 21st birthday last year, Russia invaded Ukraine. Soroka has family in the cities of Kyiv and Dnipro. The looking on has become a kind of soreness, the consequence of coping with grief. His challenge is not to let it wear him down.

“After the invasion just shock,” he says. “I remember seeing it and saying ‘this is not going to happen, it’s not going to happen’. Then it did happen. It was just shock. I’d come home and stick on the Ukrainian news and watch it 24/7.

“The first few days you’re stuck to the TV. It was traumatising. It was so messed up. It is so messed up. It does wear you down, I’m not going to lie. What my brother and me do now is try not to look at the news as much. I try once a day, once every two days unless something big happens.”

Older brother Ivan also plays rugby for Clontarf and he has a younger sister, Dasha. His mother Tanya and father Vassyl both have close relatives in Ukraine. It is his granny Raeesa who lives in Dnipro, a city of around one million people further south and to the east of Kyiv.

Throughout 2022 and in January of this year Russia launched a variety of missiles and kamikaze drones into Dnipro, striking residential buildings, bus depots and the airport.

Raeesa lives near a metro station, where most people go when the shelling begins. Dozens in the city have been killed and hundreds injured.

“It is my mum’s side from Dnipro,” he says. “So, her mum and her aunties on that side are all living there. That’s my granny and my great aunties and uncles. My granny just gets on with it.”

The family speak Russian at home and they can still call their relatives. He talks of his grandmother as determined and robustly standing her ground in her city. Stoic and stubborn and brave facing down the danger.

“It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen,” he says. “There’d be a bomb right beside her because she lives near a train station. They are trying to hit logistics centres. So that station would be a target.

“She’s always hearing explosions. She’d be funny, well not funny ... we’d be ‘are you okay, are you okay? and she’d be ‘what are you taking about?’ She’s just not rattled by it. It’s weird in a way.”

Rugby came by school in Belvedere College and Clontarf RFC underage after the family moved from Cork once the maternity ward had magicked Alexi into the world. The Soroka family had little understanding of Ireland’s fee-paying system.

“I hate that title Rugby School he says.

Because some people use it as a slur? “Exactly.”

“My parents ... you know private school and that stuff ... they had no idea of how that works. Someone just said Belvedere. They’d just arrived. They applied and Ivan got in and started playing. I said I’d give it a try and went down and loved it.”

Without knowing it, the parents had chosen the sport their two sons would play. Alexi also played basketball, soccer and Gaelic football but was exceptional at rugby and taken into the Irish system.

He played on the Irish under-20 team with Leinster’s Joe McCarthy and Munster outhalf Jack Crowley, who have both recently been capped at senior level by Andy Farrell. Last summer he was invited on to the Emerging Irish panel for a three-match tour of South Africa as one of 20 forwards. Another step up.

“I went to the Emerging Ireland and broke my foot in camp, so missed out in that,” he says. “Came back in the new year to play against Connacht which was 35 minutes. Great game. It was the first time my parents watched me playing. Special. The next week I played with ‘Tarf, broke my finger. So, I’m coming back from that now.

“It’s been a frustrating year or two. Get a bit of momentum. Injured. Get a bit of momentum. Season over. Bit of momentum. Injury again. Frustrating. That’s life. I’ll be fine.

“My ambition is simple. I want to play for Leinster. I want to play for Ireland. I want to play for the Lions. I want to win trophies. I want what everyone wants.”

Rugby and Ukraine have now organically intertwined. He was not surprised by the breadth of Irish support but disarmed by its intensity. It opened another door into his understanding of people.

“Seeing how everyone is reacting back home, it makes me proud to be a Ukrainian,” he says. “Seeing how people are reacting here, it’s made me proud to be Irish.”

There is also a breathtaking sense of belonging, of how Leinster gathered around and the way Clontarf bought in to the unfolding catastrophe 3,000 kilometres away. Small things. The draping of the Ukraine flag in the changing room.

In South Africa the flag appeared on the pitch after Leinster played against Stormers and the match commentary mentioned Soroka’s GoFundMe appeal on television after former chief executive Mick Dawson sat the commentator down for a coffee before the game.

The unsolicited kindness of a group of Clontarf girl scouts who baked cakes to raise a few euros, sweet decencies and goodwill have not been far away.

The beneficiary of around €65,000 raised so far is the Okhmadits Childrens Hospital in Kyiv, the largest in Ukraine.

“It’s not me,” he says. “I feel people are giving me too much credit. Know what I mean. All my Leinster team-mates blew it up everywhere and donated loads of money. And my club Clontarf raised about 15 grand by themselves. It’s not me. It’s everyone around who have been special. I feel so grateful about that.”

The rugby and his family’s war continue along closely aligned paths. The higher the profile of Soroka in Leinster and Ireland teams, the more he will draw attention to what he sees as indefensible destruction and brutality. The sport remains comfortable with that relationship.

“Leinster is crazy,” he says. “Six or seven international backrows. You’re training around these guys. Lads like Caelan Doris, [Josh] van der Flier ... even sitting and eating with them you see how their mind works.

“You can get overwhelmed if it doesn’t go your way, like it hasn’t gone my way with injuries. This year it was, ‘right I’m going to have a really good year, my breakout year.’ Then I got injured. It was such a bad mindset.”

The mood, though, is far from self pity. He thought of Emerging Ireland, great they see me now. Looking in on Leinster games, he thought fantastic, they’ve noticed me. He’s right, they have. Still, Ukraine is ever far away and always close beside.

“Now, I just try and not look,” he says of Dnipro, Kharkiv and Mariupol, scarred and devastated places. “It does weigh you down. I am not going to lie. When I see it ... it’s disgusting.

“I feel sick and helpless. I feel so sh*t and then the feeling of what’s the word ... desperation, yeah, that’s the word, desperation. You just can’t do anything about it. I suppose that drives you to try and keep helping.

“Now with the rugby, I was thinking I’ve messed it up and that is overwhelming. So, I literally take it one week at a time, one day at a time.

“Sounds like a spoof. But I think every day is a brick. Build enough bricks and you have a house.”

In Dublin as in Dnipro, people holding similar thoughts.