Kharkiv

The club won the 2025/2026 Higher League, the country's second tier, and goes up to the Superleague for 2026/2027 — its first honour in the modern game. Kharkiv has no Superleague or Cup title from the post-1991 era to point to.

Home games are played at DS Lokomotiv in Kharkiv. The club's history before that is thin on the record, though its veterans' side has been active since at least 2016, when it began entering tournaments, and went on to win the Club European Championship for Veterans — a stranger achievement than it sounds, given how much harder it has been simply to field a first team.

Among the players carrying the club into the top division, Ilya Zhovba has been named repeatedly in match reports from the promotion campaign, alongside Oleh Bordunov and Yuriy Prokopenko. Kharkiv arrives in the Superleague without an established rival in the division — Odessa and Donbas are opponents on the calendar rather than anything sharper — and the task ahead is simply staying there.