Every day, Dasha Zarivna faces down the might of Moscow’s disinformation machine and fights to ensure that Ukraine’s resistance inspires a positive narrative in the world’s media.
Working 18-hour days ever since Russian tanks crossed the border, almost a year ago, Zarivna, 33, is on the frontline of crisis comms. As communications chief at the Office of the President of Ukraine, she must constantly monitor the Kremlin’s digital attacks, while coping with an ongoing physical threat from Russian missiles.
Worse, she has moved her 12-year-old daughter out of the country and her parental home in Kherson is empty, after being occupied by Russian forces. Zarivna’s grandmother is in hospital after her rural house was destroyed in a rocket attack.
But Zarivna can access one asset that any PR professional would envy – the personal charisma of President, Volodymr Zelensky, named last month as Time magazine’s 2022 Person of the Year. “From the very beginning, the president made us all so dedicated and focused on building the most powerful communication that could help us to win.”
Zelensky is a supreme communicator. The former actor and TV producer rallies Ukrainians daily by recording speeches, invariably delivered from his familiar green armchair. In delivering historic and passionate addresses to the US Congress, the European Union and the United Nations General Assembly, he has shored up international support for Ukraine’s cause.
But as next month’s anniversary of the invasion approaches, Zarivna and her team must ensure that backing does not falter as Western news agendas shift. Her focus is on gaining coverage for Zelensky’s plan for a global summit in February to discuss his 10-point peace formula, set out in his November speech to the G20 in Bali. “We are preparing op-eds, interviews, speakers for different media outlets and think-tanks,” she says.
She must contend with Russian infowars aimed at undermining Ukraine’s morale and its strategic partnerships. More so than international audiences, Ukrainians are attuned to Kremlin misinformation after a series of popular channels on the Telegram social network were exposed as Russian-controlled, she claims. “They were widely read and people believed almost everything that was written.” Telegram remains the critical forum for winning hearts and minds in both Russia and Ukraine. Zelensky is a Russian speaker and has reached out to Russians with his own messaging.
Zarivna was part of his team on the night before the invasion, as he shaped his last-minute plea to the Russian public by speaking it out loud. “He needs to talk it through,” she says. “Some people need to sit and write or to listen to somebody, but for him when he starts to talk one idea comes after another.”
She is often asked if the president has a dedicated speech-writer but says he does not. “He already comes with 70 per cent of the text. Almost all the punchlines and metaphors and emotional figures of speech are brought by Zelensky himself.”
Having edited a magazine and founded her own PR agency, Zarivna was hired by Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council as head of communications. She switched to the Office of the President in 2019, when the former US president Donald Trump sought to cajole Zelensky into investigating the Biden family. “It was a very tricky moment,” she recalls.
Her immediate boss, Zelensky’s chief-of-staff Andriy Yermak, has – like several senior Ukrainian figures – a media background. A former film producer who has known Zelensky since his time in television, Yermak is the key figure implementing the president’s vision. As well as Zarivna’s comms role, which has seen her criticising Russia’s pre-Christmas bombing of Ukraine’s critical infrastructure and publicising the “grain from Ukraine” scheme to send food to Africa, she has operational responsibilities. She worked with Yermak on last year’s freeing of the mayor of Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, in exchange for nine captured Russian conscripts.
Expressing a personal view, she wishes that international media would refrain from implying that the war is the work of a single politician, Vladimir Putin. “It’s Russian imperialism,” she says. “If Ukraine’s victory is not total then this animal will raise its head again.”
When Russian troops occupied her family home, they used her books for fire lighters, she says. Soon after Ukraine recaptured Kherson in November, Zarivna enjoyed one of her most satisfying pieces of communication when she uploaded a video of people in her home city singing the national anthem.
The fighting goes on and so does the information war. But Zarivna will at least be reunited with her daughter who is returning to Kyiv. “She says she is not afraid of bombings and we will start living together from summer.”
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