Mystetskyi Arsenal and UAF StratCom Announce Program Partnership

The Strategic Communications Department of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine will join the 12th International Book Arsenal Festival as a program partner. In particular, the UAF StratCom will co-organize the exhibition project I Put On a Pixel Camo. Stories of Those Who Have Chosen to Fight and will present the documentary Resilience and Unity. Writers Explain How Not to Lose the Future.

The I Put On a Pixel Camo exhibition project will present portraits of Ukrainian men and women who have applied their civilian skills in the military, put on uniforms and continued their professional path in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Based on a series of stories recorded by the UAF StratCom, Mari Kinovych, a well-known Ukrainian illustrator, created a series of portraits of military personnel who made a conscious choice to fight and use their profession to defend their motherland.

“For Mystetskyi Arsenal, the program partnership with the Ukrainian Armed Forces is of great importance. It is an honor for us to join forces with the General Staff’s StratCom, as the fate of our country, and therefore our culture, directly depends on the Armed Forces of Ukraine. We would like to help those of us who search for an answer to the question: How can I be useful in defense of my country? Thus, we have tried to initiate such a conversation through the real stories of Ukrainian women and men embodied in the illustrations by Mari Kinovych, which you will be able to see soon at the Book Arsenal Festival,” comments on the partnership Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta, Director General of Mystetskyi Arsenal.

In addition to the I Put on a Pixel Camo exhibition project, during the Book Arsenal Festival, the UAF StratCom will hold a premiere screening of the documentary  Resilience and Unity. Writers Explain How Not to Lose the Future. The film analyzes the significance of literature in the context of hybrid warfare and emphasizes the role of writers in shaping the national consciousness and the country’s cultural backbone. The experts of the film include: Volodymyr Yermolenko, Oksana Zabuzhko, Serhiy Zhadan, Oleksandr Mykhed, Iryna Tsilyk, and Artem Chekh. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion.

“The program partnership between the UAF StratCom and Mystetskyi Arsenal opens up new opportunities for dialogue between the military and artistic communities on key aspects of national resilience, which, in turn, is the core of national security. In this context, the exhibition project I Put on a Pixel Camo and the premiere of the documentary Resilience and Unity, followed by a panel discussion, will become not just cultural events but also an educational forum where crucial issues of information security, the impact of hybrid warfare, and the role of the intellectual elite in strengthening society will be discussed,” says Colonel Artemii Katkov, project coordinator at the UAF StratCom.

This year, the 12th International Book Arsenal Festival will be held from May 30 (the evening of the official opening) to June 2. The festival will consist of the program component and the book fair, which will take place on the first floor of the Old Arsenal building.

UAF StratCom is a military command body responsible for organizing, coordinating, and overseeing the implementation of strategic communications activities within the Ukrainian Armed Forces.