He had time to avoid the conflict and to return to Sassari to play with Dinamo again. The Croatian pivot Miro Bilan was in force at Prometey, a team from the city of Dnipro, one of the targets attacked by the Russian army. The team took part in the Ukrainian championship (he was in the lead) and in the Champions League, where he faced Sassari by beating her twice and was close to the quarterfinals.
In mid-February, given the tightening of relations with Russia, the Ukrainian teams moved to the Czech Republic to continue playing the European cup. Bilan tells Dinamo Tv: "There was concern, but the president reassured us that everything would be resolved quickly thanks to diplomacy, but unfortunately it wasn't like that".
Foreign players had families with them, almost all Ukrainian basketball players had left loved ones in their homeland. “When the war broke out, the Ukrainian players no longer slept: they were always awake to listen to the news. They trained with their cell phones on on the bench. We could not comfort them by saying that everything would be fine, because we saw that nothing was fine, even though we felt lucky because we had left just before the war began ”.
After the match against the Romanian club of Cluj, the president summoned the team: "He told us that we were all free to go, we have all become free agents". In fact, the management wanted to use all the financial resources it put into the club to help Ukraine defend itself.
Bilan explains: “I spoke to my agent, I heard Federico Pasquini, the GM of Dinamo and I decided to return to Sassari with my family, where I had a great time for two years. I've lived through absurd, crazy weeks, it's something we never expected would happen ”.
