Impact International: UK/Euro 2024 Honoree Vlad Yaremchuk

KEEPING MUSIC & CULTURE ALIVE WHILE UNDER ATTACK

A lot has been written about the challenges the professionals working in this business had to overcome over the past few years. But whether it’s rising costs, staff shortages, or secondary ticketing scandals, they all seem trivial when you consider that some of our colleagues in the European industry are under siege. The war in Ukraine, sparked by Russia’s invasion in February of 2022, is ongoing.

The achievement of bringing back Atlas Festival this year, July 19-21 at Blockbuster Mall in Kyiv, can therefore not be overstated. “Despite the blackouts, air raid alarms and constant Russian aerial attacks, forcing us to move the whole festival by one week just three days before it was supposed to start, we made it happen. We hit our main goals: we brought it back, it was safe and we have raised 100 million UAH ($2.4 million) for the country’s defence,” says the festival’s programming director, Vlad Yaremchuk.

He’s involved in the Music Ambassadors Platform by Music Saves Ukraine, an initiative by the Ukrainian Association of Music Events. “The main goal,” he explains, “is to bring expertise, experience, and knowledge from the brightest and most successful minds of the international music industry to Ukrainian up-and-coming artists and industry professionals. It addresses a lack of good education in the Ukrainian music industry. It’s especially important now to make sure that the next generation of musicians and professionals have everything they might need to pull through all the difficulties they are facing here in Ukraine and are ready to thrive after the Ukrainian victory.”

The war has been going on for nearly three years, “and sadly,” says Yaremchuk, “it feels like there is no end in sight, until the free democratic world decides to put an end to it and commits to that goal, which we are not seeing. In day-to-day life, it translates into losing our best people every single day, listening to explosions outside your window from drones and missiles almost every night, experiencing blackouts at various periods of the year, when access to electricity and good internet becomes scarce.”

How does one plan for the future, when nothing is certain? “Our lives here in Ukraine are very unpredictable and it’s impossible to guess what the future will bring,” Yaremchuk says. “So, instead, we just continue to do what we do best and try to help each other and our country for as long as it takes.”