Yaryna Matviiv

Olesia Trofymenko blends painting techniques with ancient Ukrainian embroidery. In March 2022, during the peak of the war, Dior approached Olesia to create decorations for their collection show. However, this collaboration went beyond simple set design. The world of high fashion sought to see and hear Ukraine in its unique, authentic form. The central theme of Dior's collection became the «Tree of Life» - a key element from traditional embroidered towels of the Chernihiv region.

The «Tree of Life» symbolises the triumph of light over darkness. In the first few days of Olesia Trofymenko’s exhibition at the Rodin Museum in Paris, more than 10 thousand visitors attended - an impressive turnout, according to Dior’s PR team, and a rare occurrence. Sestry spoke with Olesia about her collaboration with the globally renowned brand, how she reached European officials and millionaires, and the high-level artistry of Ukrainian embroidery.

Embroidered symbol of life’s victory over death captivated Dior's creative director

Yaryna Matviiv: Is it true that the news about collaborating with Dior caught you off guard while you were in the garden?

Olesia Trofymenko: That is exactly what happened. In some ways, I was lucky because, during the invasion, I was far from Kyiv, in a village. But emotionally, it was very difficult - panic attacks would not leave me alone. On the fourth day of the war, I went out to plant a garden. It was my psychological protest against death and all the horrors Russia was causing. It was my personal war to claim the right to plant flowers and gardens on my land, in defiance of the machinery of death.

By the way, in Kyiv, it is quite noticeable: flowerbeds, which were usually overrun with weeds, are now planted with flowers. When I spoke with my neighbours, they had the same impulse - to urgently fill this wounded earth with beauty.

It was during this time that I received a call from the curator of an exhibition we had done back in 2014. At that time, Benetton held an annual exhibition inviting a hundred artists from different countries to paint on 10/15 centimetre canvases - challenging but interesting work. With the start of the full-scale invasion, it was decided to repeat this exhibition in Rome.

Back in 2014, I managed to embroider a fragment on that tiny canvas because I had just invented my painting-embroidery technique. Now, I was eager to explore this technique on a larger scale. My work caught the eye of Dior's creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri. She approached the curator about doing a joint exhibition with me. It was so unexpected!

I was standing in the garden and asked again on the phone: «Which Dior?»

The exhibition curator, Solomiya Savchuk, added that I would have 200 people working for me. I thought she meant 200 Ukrainian artists would help with the decorations. But no. «You will have 200 Indian embroiderers from Mumbai working for you», Solomiya said. In reality, there turned out to be twice as many.

It took 470 seamstresses three weeks (!) to embroider 32 of my works for Dior shows

Interestingly, this was the first Indian school where women were allowed to embroider and earn money from it (in India, traditionally, only men could earn money through embroidery). They beautifully embroidered my canvases in 3D.

- You researched Cossack embroidery from past centuries. These motifs became the face of Dior’s shows. But why did Dior turn to Ukrainian history and art?

- Well, first of all, when they approached me, it was the end of March 2022. The idea resonated because the Dior brand itself was founded after Christian Dior met his sister, who survived a Nazi concentration camp. In protest against the collapse of humanity, he established his high fashion house. It was a victory of aesthetics over destruction.

This is why it was important for them to collaborate with Ukrainian artisans (we had already witnessed Bucha and Irpin by then) - it was their political stance on the events in Ukraine. Full support.

Secondly, I use intricate embroidery techniques.

I try to showcase Ukrainian culture in a way that breaks free from the clichés that Russia has always used to present us to the world - baggy trousers and primitive embroidered shirts. In reality, Cossack embroidery is like a universe! Its aesthetic is comparable to that of Japan

For my Dior sketches, I also drew inspiration from the wedding wreaths of early 20th-century Galicia. These wreaths resemble crowns. However, the most prominent connection between me and Dior is the symbol of the Tree of Life. Dior latched onto this image. As Maria Grazia Chiuri told me, the Tree of Life is a collective symbol across all cultures. All ancient civilisations interpret it as a symbol of life’s triumph over death.

As a result, Maria Grazia completely changed the concept of her collection to incorporate this image. The «Tree of Life» became the leitmotif of the entire Dior show.

- After the Dior shows ended, did the embroidered canvases remain at the Rodin Museum?

- Yes, they hung there for a week, and museum visitors could view them. In just the first four days, 10 thousand people saw my work. The exhibition generated a lot of buzz. We spoke about Ukraine through the language of art.

Afterwards, the canvases became the property of the House of Dior.

- At the start of the war, France and Italy were still influenced by Russian propaganda. But Dior took a stand immediately?

- And that pleasantly surprised me. Maria Grazia’s first words when we met in Paris were: «Olesia, I want to tell you straight away that we are on your side, we do not believe Russian propaganda. We understand where the truth lies».

That was important because when you are abroad, it is hard to know who you can trust. Russian propaganda spends vast amounts of money to spread disinformation about the war in Ukraine.

Artists can be heard better than politicians

- A year ago, we held a screening of the film «Mariupol. Unlost Hope». Let me share the backstory: while I was creating sketches for Dior, our director Maks Lytvynov asked me to draw an illustration for a documentary about Mariupol. He filmed this right after the city was taken. In it, he interviewed women who had survived, and in the pauses between these heavy stories, I drew the city «before» and «after» the catastrophe.

This film was shown in various countries across Europe, and a French volunteer, Stéphane Delma, took an interest. He decided that more screenings should be held in France - on different public platforms.

That is how we ended up in Étretat, a tiny French commune famous for being painted by the Impressionists. The place is so popular that European millionaires have started buying houses there. It was important for us to share the stories of the women from Mariupol with this audience. However, the town’s mayor, who is over 90 years old, did not want to show the film. He said it was all politics and mentioned that he had studied Russian once. Then, things changed, just like in a movie…

The local community of active women insisted on screening the film, and after watching it, the mayor underwent a transformation. He became very sympathetic to us.

A lot of people came to the film screening, and afterwards, they asked us more detailed questions about the situation in Ukraine. Before this, the war had felt like a reality show on TV for many, but we gave them the chance to connect with the real-life experiences Ukrainians are living through. We then shared with them stories about missile attacks and how to hide from bombs and drones.

- So, does culture influence people more powerfully than media or news?

- People who create culture and art can indeed be heard better than politicians. It works.

- What makes Ukraine interesting to the global art community? Have you managed to separate the Ukrainian world from the Russian?

- Slowly, but yes. Many art historians are pushing global museums to change the attribution of works by artists who are Ukrainian, not Russian.

For Europe, we are intriguing because we have preserved a school of realist painting, but we have a different visual language and way of thinking.

We live in an age dominated by images, and we must show the world that we exist and what our culture truly represents. For too long, we were viewed as part of Russian culture, and that is partly our fault - we did not promote ourselves during peacetime. If we remain silent, we will continue to be overlooked.

Bomb explosions made from embroidered peonies

- What are you working on today?

- Right now, all my work is focused on the war in Ukraine. However, I try to address this topic metaphorically to reach a broader audience.

Otto Dix's famous paintings of World War II shocked people - the artists of that time showed the horrors of war with decomposing bodies on the streets. Since then, images of violence have become part of mainstream culture.

In contrast, I aim to «mask» these horrifying realities with beauty in my paintings. Currently, I am working on a series called «Substitution». I cover the wounds of soldiers with lilies and depict explosions using embroidered peonies. By using symbols of undeniable beauty, I hope to draw people in, to make them pause and look closer, and only then realise what the painting is truly about.

This is a uniquely Ukrainian ability - to process pain through beauty, aesthetics and harmony. After all, this is exactly what my neighbours do, creating stunning flower gardens in their courtyards between missile attacks

Our «Tree of Life» will grow through the minefields, taking deep roots of revival amid the ruins of Mariupol...

Photos from heroine’s private archive

They became the voice of Ukraine in the first hours of a full-scale invasion. Ukrainian PR people were the first to tell the world the whole truth about the events in the country and opposed Russian IPSO and propaganda. Their speeches and publications have had and have millions of coverage around the world. And the most authoritative international publications prepare materials according to PR Army employees. A real army of Ukrainian PR men has defeated Russia in the information war, but the struggle continues. Our conversation with the co-founder of PR Army, which has become the unofficial press center of Ukraine in the world.

Yuliia Petrik, head of PR software development company MacPaw, became the only Ukrainian to be shortlisted for the Future is Female award from Advertising Week and Warner Bros Discovery. Talented women who have a significant impact on the global advertising industry are nominated for this award. She is also the co-founder of Tech PR School, an educational project for food companies and startups that trains them to work with Western media.

‍What challenges were faced by Ukrainian PR agents at the beginning of the war?

This was the initiative of the first hours of the war. We met in my education chat (I taught international PR) and I had a personal chat with my alumni. And when we all woke up to the new reality that split our lives into “before” and “after”, we were in a state of shock. In those first hours it was necessary to recover, understand whether to leave or stay, because I also have a child. The company in which I worked did not hide its Ukrainian origin, but had a wide international audience. We wrote a statement to our partners that we had started a war. Just a few seconds later, we were flooded with requests to comment on what was happening in the country.

In this work chat, one of my graduates said, “And let's do something then to tell the world the truth about war!”

It was the time of PR people. After all, we all had international media contacts. Then we formed a separate chat where we started this work. When I remember this cognitive load of the first hours, I generally wonder how we survived, because in addition to the flow of news from Ukraine: “what is there in Gostomel?”, “how are the Russian troops advancing?”, “what are the traffic jams on the borders, where people have been standing for days?”, in that chat we still began to exchange requests from journalists who could not find information anywhere from eyewitnesses, those at the epicenter of the war. We have been.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry was too busy in those days to work with so many foreign journalists at the same time. This is how our PR Army initiative was born. We streamed the war in online chats for international media from the first hours of the war.

That is, have you involuntarily become such a press center of Ukraine in the world?

This is a very accurate comparison, by the way, because we coordinated the work. We did not take responsibility to comment on important things, but we did find experts and eyewitnesses who commented on it for international journalists. Over time, we have already formed a large base of hundreds of speakers, as they could comment on everything that was happening in Ukraine in various spheres: from the destruction of Ukrainian agriculture to the threat of a nuclear disaster due to the Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant.

I will allow myself to recall a few fat Russian fakes in the first weeks of the invasion, when my friend, a journalist from the Italian Associated Press, having only me in Ukraine, wrote to me via messenger: Is it true that Zelensky has already fled the country and Kiev has been left by the central authorities? I wrote back to her: Of course not! And even accused her of working on Russia. Of course, I wasn't right. She was embarrassed and apologized for not working for Russia. And then I understood the catastrophe of the information vacuum in which the world found itself regarding the events in Ukraine, and how much Russia was already paving its way into the heads of Europeans and preparing them that Ukraine would fall... Did you have such requests?

We realized then that there is a hunger for news from Ukraine on the one hand, and there is a big powerful Russian propaganda machine in the world on the other. And when a journalist came after the seizure of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant and said that he was preparing material on the comments of IAEA experts, and we know that the IAEA is an organization that is generously funded by Russia, they decided to break the plans of this journalist. When the Russians seized the nuclear power plant, a representative of the IAEA arrived, pretending not to know where the shelling of the nuclear power plant was coming from.

We convened an international press conference: we found engineers, energy engineers who could comment to the world media, what is happening at the NPP and what consequences it may have. It was also dangerous for the experts, because we know that those workers who remained at the station and could comment on something immediately disappeared: the Russians took them captive and for interrogation. Therefore, we understood the danger and attracted experts who at that time were no longer on the territory of Energodar.

The second such story was about Mariupol. We had a huge amount of inquiries from the media about what was going on there. And when the first people got out of the blockaded Mariupol and were safe, we organized meetings with international journalists. Our idea was not to offer ready-made narratives, but to hear what people who have experienced all this horror tell us.

And then the world talked about the fatigue of the war in Ukraine and the war in the Gaza Strip began, and how was it possible to keep the focus on the events in Ukraine every day?

At the beginning of the invasion, there were hundreds of volunteers in our chat: journalists, designers, producers, authors of articles. Several hundred volunteers helped us search for witnesses of Russian crimes in the most remote frontline villages

And now, we see great fatigue from the war: both in the international media and in Ukrainians even more so. Because to collect such a large amount of human grief, stress, daily challenges, and even volunteering — it is already becoming impossible. Therefore, I record and see a decline in activity. We now work as such an organizing team, but it is always a question of financing. There are fewer volunteers, and this is the biggest challenge for us. Europe is already preparing for summer vacations, and foreigners are no longer so actively looking for information reasons. Therefore, we give them daily news from Ukraine.

They say that your post in X about Scholz blocking the transfer of arms to Ukraine gained so much spread that he changed his position and eventually... gave Ukraine weapons. Is this true?

It wasn't just our efforts. These efforts are both visible and invisible. Much remains outside of social networks. Great work is done by our diplomats at all levels. This is a great example of teamwork when working at different levels for the sake of a single goal.

What were your work cases then and now? In Ukraine “not a civil war”, “Zelensky did not flee the country”, “Bucha ---- real”, “Ukrainians are not fascists”, “this is not a war between NATO and America”, “Ukraine ---- not an artificial state.” ---- supplement this list of Russian IPSOs, which had to be debunked in the world media?

From time to time it is necessary to conduct educational work with the international media. But I can say that Russia works not only through the media — it is very active in social networks, like, for example, this popular botfarm “Olgin bots”. In them, the distribution of fakes on social networks is very well financed. But what is good for Ukrainians now is the possibilities of artificial intelligence. He disseminates instantaneously casts of certain narratives. We have such projects as “Osavul”, which tracks Russian intakes and gives refutations. For example, such a fake of the Russian IPSO is known, which flooded the network that the EU forces its citizens to eat insects. “Osavul” was very good at finding these chains of origin of fakes, and we refuted this nonsense.

When the Kakhovskaya dam was blown up, Russia tried to spread the information to the world media that the Ukrainians themselves had blown it up. But we already had a ready set of speaker-commentators who spoke the truth about what happened in Kherson and commented on it in the world's media. Among our speakers were deputy ministers, environmentalists, eyewitnesses. For goodness sake, we had the first volunteers to return from there. That is, we are working ahead of time in order to have time to tell the truth faster, while Russia spreads its next lie around the world.

There were a lot of requests when the first winter came with blackouts. There were questions from foreigners, how Ukrainians survive

We were asked to find for interviews a mother who teaches her child remotely or a couple who married during the blackout. The big wave of requests was when hackers hacked Kyivstar. Foreigners saw in this a new kind of hybrid war. Europeans realized that the war is not only on the territory of Ukraine and near the borders of the EU, but that the war can reach the whole world in cyberspace.

We were interested in a request from the authoritative publication Business Insider, when they asked us to find them cats to help close the meeting of the Armed Forces. We joked that something we don't do like that if the cats already have their own PR managers. But we found such cats. And here the journalist collected a list of stories about these animals, how they became popular and which meetings are closed.

Another topic that international journalists are very interested in now is the destruction of cultural heritage in Ukraine. They ask for a list of museums, cities with architectural gems that Russia destroyed with missiles. We have a list of speakers: Ukrainian and foreign experts who comment on this for the world media.

There is also a cool project at the request of NATO, in which a team of historians refutes all Russian false historiography about the supposed common heritage of Kievan Rus for Ukraine and Russia. This team refutes other Russian fakes, which have generously covered the heads of Europeans for decades.

What do you think is the greatest success of the team?

Our most recent successful cases are publications about Ukrainian women scientists for The Independent and an article with a comment by Foreign Minister Oleg Nikolayenko on Russia's actions in the UN Security Council for Express.

Also, Mark Savchuk, one of the co-founders of PR Army, regularly appears on Canadian television and comments on events in Ukraine. It has almost a million views reach

The war showed me the true value of communication. The daughter of a Kharkiv activist who was in Russian captivity wrote to us, and we made a story about him, which was circulated in the world media. Thanks to international publicity, we were able to release him from captivity. Another person whom we managed to rescue from Russian captivity due to international publicity is one of the Ukrainian sailors. This is our best success story.

We know that many well-known European publications in France, Italy and Germany are sponsored by Gazprom. We are aware of the strange statements and policies of the Vatican regarding events in Ukraine. Pope Francis, who called the Russian propagandist Dugin an innocent victim of a crime, said how great Russia and Catherine II is and admires Dostoevsky: and all this “strange love” for Russia and its “so-called culture” ---- it is also not a plowed field. Europeans are not affected by the brutal killings of Ukrainian children and muzzled Ukrainians in Bucha and other cities ---- they further blindly see in Russia some kind of “culture”. The latest example of this “pathological love” is the victory of a pro-Russian film with Russian actors at the Cannes Film Festival. What else should Ukraine do to make the world more transparent?

I myself suffer from these questions to which I have no answer. In the world media, there is now a fashion for “think positive.” Where to get this “think positive” when missiles arrive in our country, children die, people's houses burn.

We need to talk about Russian colonialism. In fact, 42 countries of the world are victims of Russia. These countries were occupied by Russia in different periods of history on four continents of the world: from Africa and the Caucasus to Europe. Here is this informational and historical fact I would raise to a higher level of discussion. We have to say in the international media that Russia is a threat to the world. Say what will happen to the world if Russia wins. We must say that Russia is a dictatorship, a lack of rights and freedoms, it is death, suffering, concentration camps and torture of people. That the world will go into complete darkness if Russia wins. To say that Putin is like Hitler, because it really is. All racism is built on the techniques of fascism.

As soon as the world feels that it affects them directly, then they begin to think differently

Unfortunately, now Ukraine has become a trading coin in the election races in the United States and Europe. We have to convince them that our war is really their war. For it will be like the Sudetenland, who gave to Hitler in exchange for peace, and received the Second World War. Now, if we do not stop Putin, the Third World War could explode.

You compared Putin to Hitler, and I see analogies with Stalin. When people were dying in Ukraine from the Holodomor, The New York Times, Walter Duranty wrote what a “wonderful policy of Stalin” was, and that there was no famine in Ukraine. Gareth Jones, who spoke to the world about the Great Famine, was perceived as crazy. No one wanted to believe him. Now Putin is also being whitewashed, creating from him, despite all the “normal player” in the geopolitical arena. This is done by the likes of Carlson, a number of right-leaning American media outlets. PR that the FSB does ----powerful and cunning. How to convince the world that Putin's Russia ---- is it evil?

A difficult question and I have no answer to it. The only answer is systematic cultural work in the future, because consciousness changes at least in a year. Let's be honest: for how many years, decades, centuries has Russia poured its fake history into the minds of millions? And yet, in one day, even with these terrible photos from Bucha or Mariupol, it is impossible to change your mind. Therefore, there are a lot of challenges. For example, I will be the first woman from Ukraine on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival of Advertising and Creativity. And I will have to judge the advertisements of world brands that did not come out of Russia - Pepsi, for example. And it's amazing how the world has normalized what can't be normalized. Normalized the war. World brands are already disguising themselves, creating subsidiaries under other brands and returning to Russia. And what has changed? We continue to lose territory and people.

And so every Ukrainian who has gone abroad should ask himself the question: what am I doing now to promote Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian authenticity, Ukrainian narratives?

Well... we see so many people speak Russian abroad without realizing that this is also a certain signal.

We have already received the Oscar thanks to Mstislav Chernov, we have our Nobel laureate Oleksandra Matviychuk, we have the absolute boxing world champion Usyk. We have so many victories and achievements that, to a large extent, thanks to these ambassadors of PR Ukraine, we succeeded. Although this PR is very tragic and provoked by such human dramas that we would never want. Further, after our victory, what should be the PR of Ukraine in the world?

We need to open Ukraine to foreigners: to tell what a cool country it is and what it is worth fighting for.

We can say, rotating from the perspective of time, that the PR Army defeated Russia in the information war. What is the scale of PR Army's media front now?

At the beginning of the war, we worked for seven months without any legal registration. And only then the NGO was founded. We had no name or structure at the time.

Today we have a very large base that is of value to the international community. Our project THE UA View works. Every foreign journalist can enter our base and study the stage of the Russian-Ukrainian war that interests him, read the testimonies of witnesses of Russian crimes. We systematized it. We track Russian narratives, monitor them, and counter these discards with information ecology.

On our website, information events of the war are broken down by themes and directions. A separate file is how Russia destroyed Ukrainian grain, a separate file on nuclear safety, a separate file on destroyed cities under occupation. So we created the project Voices of Freedom. It is an online platform where you can get a request from a journalist for an expert in a particular field. For each foreign journalist, at his request, we select the right speaker.

A separate direction is international experts, who are also in the list of Speaker-Ambassadors of Ukraine

We still made checks on these people or were they related to Russia somewhere in their biography. Now we have made a separate direction on the destroyed cultural heritage in Ukraine, and we are attracting international speakers who also comment on these issues for the world media.

Another project, Where Are Our People?, is about the deportation of Ukrainian children. PR Army was the first to raise this topic in the world. We were the first to say that Ukrainian children are being taken to Russia so that the world will hear us. Now we have a team of lawyers in both the States and Europe who are making sure that this topic is not forgotten. We have lists of abducted children. We are doing this project together with the 5th Morning Initiative.

Russian propagandists track your work. The Russian FSB is watching you and at some point saw that you are a danger to the Russian propaganda machine. Russia launched a whole campaign against the PR Army?

We had the following two activities: the first was at the beginning of the war. One American, who clearly works for the Kremlin's salary, made a great deal of material in a very reputable publication that a whole American botfarm operates in Ukraine, that we work according to NATO guidelines. We laughed about it, realized that we were doing everything right and moved on. But later, we were given a screenshot, where Russian propagandist Soloviev wrote about us in his telegram channel. On the one hand, we understand that if Russia is afraid of us, then we do everything successfully, and on the other hand it is dangerous.

I never now indicate in real time where I am for security reasons. I once had a conversation with Mstislav Chernov, our Oscar-winning director, and I ask him: How do you feel about security issues? And he says that in fact, the threat is constantly: both during travel and at performances. We must understand that the enemy is everywhere. The enemy is monitoring. But we must win this war in which even the word has become a weapon. And we will surely win.