Svyatoslav Vakarchuk was born in1975in the western region of Ukraine Zakarpattia Oblas. Today he is best known as the singer of the music group Okean Elzy. But he is also active as a politician and human rights activist. He founded the music band when he was still a student at Lviv University in 1994. But he really became famous with his band after he participated in the TV program "Who wants to be a millionaire?", where he won the first prize and donated all his money to orphanages in Ukraine. Together with his band, he made a lot of protest songs in the sign of the OrangeRevolution in 2004, the Euromaidan in 2013and the Crimean War in 2014. Nowadays he does random concerts and gives talks on the streets or in refugee camps all over Ukraine to bring people together and give them strength through music not to give up and keep striving for a peaceful Ukraine for the future. In addition to his music career, he has also served in the parliament several times, fighting for issues related to freedom of speech. Vakarchuk also plays an active role in social and cultural projects, for example, he is the founder of the charitable foundation "LyudiMaybutnyoho" (People of the Future). Together with the members of the band, he also actively supported preventive campaigns of theInternational Organization for Migration and MTV Europe's "People Are Not For Sale". For his social commitment, he was eventually rewarded with the title of Honorary Ambassador of Culture in Ukraine and Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Program.
Hurrem Sultan
Hurrem Sultan (Roksolana) was born in Ukraine in Crimea in 1502. At the age of 15, she was captured by Crimean Tatars during a slave raid and eventually taken to Istanbul, the Ottoman capital. There she joined the imperial harem, rose through the ranks, and eventually became the favorite of Sultan Suleiman. Contrary to Ottoman tradition, the sultan married Roksolana, making her his lawful wife; this was unusual as sultans used to marry only noble ladies. Roksolana is known as the first woman in Ottoman history to be involved in state affairs. Her intelligence made herSuleiman's main advisor in state affairs, and she is said to have influenced foreign and international politics. She often accompanied him as a political advisor. Along with many other revolutionary people at the time, she ushered in an era in the Ottoman Empire called the rule of women. In addition to her political concerns, Roksolana engaged in various public works and charitable projects, from Makkah to Jerusalem. Her first foundations included a mosque, two Koranic schools, a fountain and awomen's hospital near the women's slave market in Istanbul. She also founded, for example, the Haseki Sultan Imaret in Jerusalem in1552, a public soup kitchen to feed the poor, which is said to have fed at least 500 people twice a day. Besides that, she also setup a charity fund that helped establish a new district in Istanbul for the poorer population–Aksaray.
Volodymyr Zelensky
Volodymyr Zelensky was born in1978in the city of Kryvyy Rih in Ukraine, he was best known as an actor, comedian, and director of TV companies before the 2019 presidential elections. He studied law at the National University of Kryvyi Rih, but already during his schooling, it became clear that he wanted to take a different path, as he was already involved in comedy at that time. In 1997 he founded the cabaret group Quarter 95 (LivingBlock 95). After his studies, he went down that road, collaborating on TV shows and playing roles in films and comedies. After a few years of experience, he also founded his own media company Kvartal 95 which became very popular. In 2015 he played the fictional lead role as president in the TV series "Servant of the People" in which he fought corruption as president and not much later he started a real-life successful anti-corruption campaign on social media. This is how he became popular and won the presidential election in 2019. But above all, he gained worldwide recognition as the war leader of Ukraine during the Russian invasion that began in February 2022. The Harvard Political Review wrote that Zelensky" harnessed the power of social media to become the first true online war leader in history, bypassing traditional gatekeepers while using the Internet to reach people. " BBC News and The Guardian reported that Zelensky's response to the invasion was praised even by earlier critics.
Olena Zelenska
Olena Zelenska was born in1978 in central Ukraine and is known as a screenwriter for state TV and current first lady. She first studied architecture at Kryvyi Rih National University where she also met her current husband Volodymyr Zelensky. When her husband first told her that he wanted to turn his career in theater and television into a political career, she was not overjoyed. Later, when he was finally elected, she took her role as the first lady seriously. For example, Zelenska initiated Ukraine's accession to the G7 international initiative on gender equality, the BiarritzPartnership. In addition, she committed to Ukrainian culture, she initiated an initiative to spread the Ukrainian language around the world, while also working for a barrier-free society. Besides that, she did a reform of the school feeding system and since then, one of her main initiatives has been to improve children's nutrition, developing new school menus with chef Ievgen Klopotenko and providing more resources and food regulations starting in 2021. She also works to improve access to health care and to social and economic success, which are some of the focuses of her work on the "Without Barriers" initiative. She also supports social causes such as the Paralympics and the fight against domestic violence. Since the start of the war in February 2022, her efforts focused on humanitarian aid, particularly the evacuation of disabled children by Poland and the importation of incubators to hospitals in war zones. In addition, she is a great support to her husband and continues to give theUkrainianpopulationgood cheer in speeches.
Mustafa Abdülcemil Dzhemilev
Mustafa Abdülcemil Dzhemilev was born on November 13, 1943, in a Soviet village in Crimea, which was later occupied by Nazi Germany. About six months later, his family was deported to Central Asia along with more than 180,000 other Crimean Tatars. He is one of the best-known human rights activists in the region and the chairman of the Crimean Tatar National Movement. He was often persecuted by the communist Soviet regime and later by Russia for his actions and political views. He always supported the development of contact between the Crimean Tatar National Movement and human rights activists and dissidents and regularly called on the governments of democratic countries and the international community to pay attention to the violation of the rights of the Crimean Tatar people. Before the age of 20, he founded an association for Crimean Tatar youth that advocated the return of Crimean Tatars to their homeland. Later, Dzhemilev was convicted five times and spent a total of about 15 years in prison for his fight for the rights of the Crimean Tatar people. In1975, Dzhemilev went on a ten-month hunger strike, the longest ever in a human rights movement, but he survived by being force-fed. In May 1989, he was elected to head the newly formed National Movement of Crimean Tatars, a movement characterized by consistent adherence to nonviolence. That same year, he and his family returned to Crimea, whereupon 250,000 Tatars eventually returned to their homeland. In the 1990s, Dzhemilev became involved in politics. In 1998, he was elected to the Ukrainian parliament in Kyiv as a member of the Narodny Ruch Ukrainy (Ukrainian People's Movement) party and remains a member of the parliament until today. Since the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014, he has been denied access to the island. Dzhemilev has been nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize, and in October 1998 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees awardedDzhemilev the Nansen Medal for his outstanding efforts and "his commitment to the right of return of the Crimean Tatars."
Ivan Franko
Ivan Franko born in1856in Ukraine was a famous Ukrainian writer, journalist, political activist, and figure in the liberation movement. At an early age, Franko began composing poetry and plays. In 1875 he entered the university in Lemberg (later Lviv State IvanFrankoUniversity), where he became a socialist and contributed to political and literary journals and to populist newspapers. Active political involvement and occasional imprisonment interrupted his studies, which were completed at the University of Vienna in 1891. In his later years, he grew critical of Marxist socialism and supported Ukrainian nationalism. He was a co-founder of the socialist and nationalist movement in western Ukraine. Besides that, he wrote dramas, lyric poetry, short stories, essays, and children’s verse, but his naturalistic novels chronicling contemporary Galician society and his long narrative poems mark the height of his literary achievement. Along with his thought-provoking poems and novels, the legacy of Franko has become intertwined in Ukrainian culture. In addition to his own literary work, he also translated the works of such renowned figures as William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, and Goethe,... In 1915 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but he died before he was able to receive it.
Olga Kobylianska
Olga Kobylianska was born in 1863 and is one of the first feminists from Ukraine.The feminist movement in Ukraine would not have been possible without Ukrainian writer Olga Kobylianska. In novels and stories, she portrayed the problems of the Ukrainian intellectuals of her generation and formed the view of life in Bukovina, Western Ukraine. She was the first to embrace feminist ideas in Ukrainian literature and to raise the theme of women’s emancipation.Her first novellen were written in German, beginning in 1880. From 1891 she lived in Chernivtsi. Her travels and acquaintance changed her cultural and political outlook, and she became involved in the Ukrainian women's movement in Bukovyna and began writing inUkrainian. Many of her works—including the novels Liudyna (A Person, 1891) and Tsarivna (The Princess, 1895)—have as theirprotagonists cultured, emancipated women oppressed in a philistine, provincial society; semiautobiographical elements and the influence of the writings of George Sand and Friedrich Nietzsche are evident. For most of her life, Olga Kobylianska lived inChernivtsi. Today, in the house where she lived, you can visit the memorial museum.
Hryhorii Skovoroda
Hryhorii Skovoroda born in 1722 was a Ukrainian philosopher, poet, and pedagogue. He was not only the founder of landscape lyrics (a genre of poetry representing the author’s attitude toward nature), but also added to the contributions of ancient Greek philosophers’ works on local culture and academic education. Skovoroda's work contributed to the culturalheritage of modern-day Ukraine claiming him as a native son. Skovoroda also created a philosophical concept of intrinsic labor that simplified the understanding of the way to achieve happiness. In other words, he established the idea of “love what you do and do what you love.”
Taras Shevchenko
Taras Shevchenko was born in 1814, he was a poet, prose writer, playwright, artist, and political and public figure in Ukraine. In his works, Shevchenko dreamed of the times when his motherland would become an independent sovereign state. His literarylegacy is considered to be the beginning of modern Ukrainian literature and gave a very important impetus to the emergenceof the modern Ukrainian language. It is not surprising that many of Shevchenko’s poems and songs became folk songs. Hiscollection of poems Kobzar (1840) was translated into more than 100 languages, and monuments in his honor have beeninstalled in 35 countries. His image is a symbol of freedom for Ukrainians.
Viacheslav Chornovil
Viacheslav Chornovil is anUkrainian politician and journalist born in1936. He started studying journalism at the University ofKiev in the 1950s, which he had to interrupt because he had too many fierce political ideas. He eventually completed his studies but was not admitted to further studies, so he started working as a construction worker. Later, he worked for severalnewspapers but this did not always go smoothly because his controversial ideas did not go down well with everyone. He was put in prison for not supporting a lawsuit from one of his bosses and later also for his own journalistic work thatalso involved an exile in Siberia. During these prison periods he also regularly participated in protests and hunger strikes. Towards the end of the 1980s, his political views only grew stronger and he became a co-founder and signatory for theindependence of Ukraine. He also co-founded the pro-independence Popular Rukh party. Today he is still a symbol of the struggle for the independence of Ukraine.
Alla Yaroshinskaya
Alla Yaroshinskaya is an Ukrainian journalist born in1953in the Zhytomyr region of Ukraine. After her journalism studies, she started working for a local newspaper where she was known for her critical view of corruption in the political system, which regularly led to her being called to the chief editor’s office. After the nuclear disaster in Chornobyl in 1986, she started investigating the consequences for the local population. With her journalistic work, she exposed all kinds of problems that were kept hidden by the government and the journalism world. Later on, she was elected as a politician in the USSR, where she continued her research in official committees, despite the fact that there was still a lot of opposition from politicians. Afterward, she published several books and articles on the subject, including an encyclopedia that explains in detail the consequences of a nuclear disaster. She also appeared on the international political stage and continued to fight therefore the themes of human rights, free press and the nuclear issue. For example, she took part intheUN women's conferences, the negotiations of the NFPT treaty and the Ecological congress. For these good deeds, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 and won the RightLivelihood award in 1992.