To raise awareness on gender equality in Ukraine, we created an activation idea for Kyiv’s pride event that became mind-blowing for Ukrainian society. With a simple but powerful stunt, we transformed a Soviet symbol into a human rights symbol. This transformation of meaning in real-time was immersive and engaged people into conversation about gender equality, like no national Pride event before. In 2020, there was only one Pride participant on the street in Ukraine, but it became visible across the country and the world.

The Motherland Monument - the tallest European statue - is a symbol of Victory and Protection. But even now, in modern Ukraine, there is no protection of gender equality. Defending LGBTQ+ rights is not only hard, it’s also dangerous. Sometimes during Pride events there are more policemen than participants. There have been more than 400 attacks against LGBTQ+ activists over the past 3 years.

In Ukraine, Pride events do not have a long history. COVID-19 in 2020 made it even more difficult, as all Pride events were canceled and switched to online, which reduced the audience dramatically. Online involves only LGBTQ+ activists. Offline Pride events are a moment of visibility for a wide audience. If you cannot be seen, you cannot be heard. KyivPride has a difficult task - during a pandemic they needed a campaign that spread online Pride events across the country.

We hacked the tallest European statue, the iconic Motherland Monument, with the help of drones by attaching a huge rainbow flag to its sword in real-time. The statue’s symbolism was transformed – from the protection of Soviet values to human rights protection and raising awareness on gender equality.

A key aspect of the strategy is to present the largest totalitarian symbol in Ukraine in an absolutely new and unexpected way.

We have a very traditional post-Soviet society in Ukraine. We still have a statue with possibly the largest Soviet state emblem in the world on it - the Motherland Monument.

We used this iconic monument - the symbol of Victory and Protection - which in fact “protects” only inhuman Soviet values (??for example, in the USSR there was a criminal persecution of representatives of the LGBTQ + community) and turning it into a symbol of gender equality and human rights protection.

It was an upside-down shift in symbolism that immediately resonated with society. In fact, with our stunt, we set up the only relevant meaning to the monument - the Motherland should protect all “children”.

The strategy was all about context - cultural as well as physical.

We would never get permission to hang a flag on the Motherland Monument for political reasons. The dimensions of the sword and flag are such that it is physically impossible to do this without damaging the monument. Therefore, we used a technological solution.

We had only one chance to do this until the police would stop us, which is why we needed careful preparation.

We calculated and produced a flag of the required size and weight.

We monitored the movement of the clouds in real-time using the air radar. Even light rain and increased humidity could make the flag too heavy and the drone would lose control.

It was necessary to monitor the strength and direction of the wind in order to adjust the position of the drone with the flag, so that the flag was “fixed” near the sword.

The second drone introduced a live stream of the event.

The task was to make our Pride event visible in Kyiv during COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. But our stunt made Kyiv’s Pride visible all over the world with more than 100 million impressions in the first three days (Source: CMM).

The culture-changing stunt blew up the media agenda of Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Everybody, from members of Parliament to stand-up comedians started talking about it. As a result, our stunt became #1 top news on Yandex and the most discussed news in social media (Source: Yandex).

The Motherland Monument stunt was recognized as the EVENT OF THE YEAR in Ukraine & Eastern Europe (Source: Zaborona.org).

Our event started a public discussion about LGBTQ+ rights not only in Ukraine but in more than 50 other countries as well (Source: CMM). For example, the top TV-channel of the Russian Federation, Russia-1, aired two hour-long prime-time programs dedicated exclusively to this event.