War-Life Balance: How Ukrainian Creatives Are Adapting

The following article is from Adweek’s special issue “On Ukraine, by Ukrainians,” published April 25, 2022, and created entirely by Ukrainian writers, editors and artists amid the ongoing all-out war in their homeland. After Feb. 24, life is never gonna be the same for any Ukrainian. The brutal and unprovoked russian invasion has changed the lives of the 40-million nation overnight. These are three stories of how the Ukrainian creative community adapted to the new wartime reality: One spare seat is one life saved Andrii Mishchenko overslept the start of the war. An independent creative strategist, he had flown back to Ukraine mere hours before russia reignited the 8-year war on Feb. 24. Mishchenko and his wife were on vacation in Barcelona but decided to go back to Kyiv on Feb. 23 despite the looming threat of war. They were tired after a day of traveling, coming back home from the airport late. Then the full-scale war started. “Wake up, russia has invaded us,” Mishchenko recalls telling his wife. They had to flee Kyiv, but neither he nor his wife had a driver’s license. His father-in-law insisted on getting them out of the city, driving out for them from Chernivtsi, 340 miles away. To meet him halfway, they started asking around if someone could pick them up while leaving the city. Eventually, they found a friend heading their way and had spare seats in the car. The whole trip took 22 hours. The eventual feeling of safety, he confides, was comparable to the one he had after escaping his hometown of Donetsk, captured by the russian forces and their proxies back in 2014. Mishchenko knew what exactly he needed to do the next day. He reached out to his friend Vitaliy Bandura to develop an evacuation service. “Vitalik was in Odesa the day the war started, but he had a car, so he was picking up hitchhikers on the way. The idea was to connect drivers and the people who need a ride,” Mishchenko explains. So they created the free Nam Po Dorozi bot in Telegram messenger to connect drivers and evacuees while rideshare apps were overwhelmed. The project was launched on Feb. 28, and in the first week it got 10,000 requests. The drivers were outnumbered, so Mishchenko and Bandura launched a campaign on Instagram with an effective call to action: “One spare seat is one life saved.” Mishchenko’s now keeping himself busy in Chernivtsi’s relative safety. He’s organizing a team that creates campaigns for the Ukrainian government, and he’s also been involved in Act Like Zelensky NFT collection. He was working 20-hour shifts for the first weeks of the war, but now tries to take at least half a day off to recover. “In wartime, everyone’s got to do their best,” Mishchenko says. “Soldiers have to fight, and the creative community has to help with creative problem-solving.” Switching from ad to bread—for the wartime Meriam Yol is a producer turned wartime warehouse manager. “The producing experience definitely comes in handy,” she says. The Arriba! creative agency producer started to volunteer on the very first day of the full-scale war and has unexpectedly been running a coffee shop in Kharkiv. “The owners had to leave the city but gave me the keys. So we’re trying to keep it busy now,” Yol says. Coffee, tea, and the fancy vegan sweets were good, but baking equipment was better. The team started to bake 150 loaves of bread a day for those in need. When Arriba! founder Max Burtsev launched the Volonterska volunteering effort, Yol was put in charge of its warehouse. “I’m a warehouse manager now. It’s like a difficult location shoot, with five location changes," she says. "And with rockets flying over your head." Every day, the Volonterska team organizes food and medicine for hundreds of elderly residents in the constantly shelled Kharkiv. “It’s the people who don’t have messenger apps that need help. And the way to reach them is with the landline,” Yol explains. So Arriba! set up a call line for the people who need support. Yol’s job is to manage the incoming humanitarian aid and make sure the supplies are readily available. “Say we get a call from an elderly man with psoriasis, urgently needing a specific ointment. The medicine is nowhere to be bought in Kharkiv, but it can be delivered. So we need to find a way to get it. Even if it requires a unicorn,” she explains. Yol tells the recent story that moved her. A woman left a request for delivery: food for one person, pump for a wheelchair, no need for medicine. “Send it to the people who need it more,” the woman added in notes. “These people—that’s what keeps me going,” Yol says. Live, leave, love Ilia Anufrienko had a feeling the war was coming. A week before the invasion, the Bickerstaff.284 agency founder took his pregnant wife and two children to a safer place in the west of Ukraine. The news about the war reached him on the train to Lviv. “It’s not the rockets you hear, it’s fireworks,” he recalls consoling his daughter. Anufrienko’s first instinct was to make sure his family was safe, so he decided to head to Europe. It was shortly before the Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 were forbidden from leaving the country. Anufrienko says that he moved fast, because he’d been there before. Back in 2014, the art director had to go back to his hometown Luhansk to evacuate his mother from the russian occupation. “Everyone thought I was being paranoid when I took my family to Lviv. But 2014 taught me that anything can happen—no matter how crazy it seems. And I just couldn’t imagine hiding in a bomb shelter with my pregnant wife,” he says. The family is safe in Portugal now, Anufrienko’s wife is due to give birth shortly. He’s making the most of his safety, working on several projects such as a plea to the russian soldiers’ mothers and a hip-hop campaign for a dog shelter. There’s no business as usual in wartime. Anufrienko’s team is working remotely now from different parts of Ukraine and Europe: “We’re working faster," says the Bickerstaff founder. “The projects that took five reviews are getting approved in no time. Every minute counts.” Anufrienko adds that he’s taking time to talk to his colleagues individually, offering help and support. Bickerstaff.284 is the LIA and Epica Award-winning agency founded by Anufrienko in 2020. He says part of the reason he wanted to lead a team of his own was to focus on social projects. “I told my team that our priority is to help the Ukrainian government fight the invaders,” the founder says. Their newest campaign is the Glory to Ukraine foundation for the Ukrainian parliament. Anufrienko says he’s received offers from the European agencies both before and after the invasion, but his priority is Bickerstaff. “We have 17 team members. I can’t leave them; that’d feel like a betrayal to me. We just have to keep working and trying to help Ukraine and the economy,” he says. With nearly 5 million people fleeing Ukraine, the nation faces an unprecedented brain drain. Anufrienko is adamant he stands with his homeland: “I don’t plan to go back, because the way I see it, I never left. We’re trying to help from here.”

Ukraine

War-Life Balance: How the Lives of Ukrainian Creatives Have Been Reshaped by War

3 personal stories of life amid invasion

One spare seat is one life saved

Yaroslav Druziuk

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Yaroslav Druziuk