Anastasiya Baydachenko, CEO of IAB Ukraine continues to share her firsthand experiences of navigating the digital advertising industry in Ukraine during wartime. Each month she shares insights into the challenges, resilience, and innovation she and her team experience and how they are shaping the industry in unprecedented times.
As they say, for several weeks, we have been living in a truce, with no attacks on energy facilities or civilians. This is a very reassuring message for the Western audience, creating the illusion of peacemaking and diplomatic efforts. But how are things really going in Ukraine during the truce?
Indeed, there have been no strategic aviation flights for several weeks. But as we say in Ukraine if there are none, then they are preparing. Instead, the enemy has chosen a new tactic, when a large number of drones simultaneously attack a regional center or a strategically important large city. For a long time, drones attacked mainly Kyiv and eastern cities, occasionally moving deep into the country, now they are attacking unexpected targets, and the worst thing is that these cities are far from ready to repel such attacks. A massive drone attack cannot be effectively repelled only by the mobile groups themselves, there must also be air defense, which is lacking throughout the country. And ballistic strikes, unfortunately, are still happening.
In reality, such “peace” attacks end with hits or falling debris on civilian infrastructure and houses. All this happens at night, so the phrase 'the night is dark and full of terrors' best describes the realities of the everyday life of Ukrainians. Every night, if you wake up and it’s quiet, it only means that another city took the hit, not that there was no hit. Every night means someone will lose their life, a roof over their head, a business - or just glass in the windows, as the best option. When you read in the morning that a warehouse, a shop, or a non-residential building has burned down, you say – it’s good that everyone is alive. A lot of people die in their beds or without being able to escape from a fire, which often starts with falling debris or an explosion. The enemy reports that it hit an ammunition depot, a decision-making centre, or a military facility.
Last Thursday, we were supposed to broadcast “Women in Digital,” a live broadcast dedicated to the problems of women building a career in the digital industry. But on Sunday, 23rd March, we learned that drone debris had fallen into our studio, where we broadcast from. Isn’t it a strategic military facility? All the windows and doors in the building were blown out, and the studio where the filming was taking place was damaged. Fortunately, we managed to find a replacement, and still went on the air quickly.
However, this situation made it clear how illusory any planning is in the realities of war when a missile or drone can fall on the location of an event or conference, injure a speaker or broadcast team, or a hostile attack on power plants across the country will lead to an emergency blackout and it will not be possible to go on the air at all.
And on the one hand, we have coped, and, of course, we must be ready to quickly find a way out of such crises, and not fold our paws and let the storm drown us. But honestly, we just want to work calmly and rest a little, focusing on routine planned tasks, and not be a hybrid of a crisis manager, superwoman, and four-armed Lakshmi all the time.
Ukrainians know better than anyone that 'the night is dark and full of terrors'. Each of these horrors has its sound and we have learned to distinguish them and assign them a level of danger.
But we dream of silence at night.
