Business Unusual: Four Great Corporate Campaigns From War-Torn Ukraine

(MENAFN- PRovoke) The quality of public relations work coming out of Ukraine since the Russian invasion four years ago has been hugely impressive. And while much of it has been directly related to the war-humanitarian relief issues and government education campaigns-several of the campaigns we saw in this year's SABRE Awards provide a reminder that companies need to continue their communications efforts, even against a backdrop of chaos and conflict.

This article summarizes four of those campaigns: McDonald's engaging influencers to help recruit a younger workforce; Mastercard tackling mental health issues with a major exhibition; energy company DTEK handling the crisis caused by attacks on infrastructure and turning its employees into heroes; and retailer Rozetka connecting with consumers by restoring cultural artifacts damaged by the invading forces.

In every case, the company involved needed to be sensitive to the mood of a nation under siege, to balance the need for business continuity with an understanding of the unique circumstances, to engage with critical issues without appearing to exploit an appalling situation.

Key takeaways from the article that follows:

McDonald's needed to hire several thousand new employees a year including for the first time minors, aged 16 and 17-a notoriously difficult group to reach. “Ukrainian audiences expect brands to demonstrate empathy and awareness of the broader context.” The campaign generated a 60% increase in job applications so that by the end of the year 10% of all restaurant employees are 16 or 17. According to sociological research, 44% of Ukrainians rated their mental health as unsatisfactory. “Launching Third Wind, an immersive exhibition dedicated to mental wellbeing, during the full-scale war meant operating in an environment of constant uncertainty.” In six weeks, the“Third Wind” exhibition welcomed more than 110,000 visitors, becoming one of the most attended cultural projects in Ukraine during the war. Power outages in Ukraine, caused by sustained Russian attacks on energy infrastructure, reached unprecedented levels by December. DTEK sought to“move beyond purely service-driven communication and engage with society on an emotional level, not triggering irritation, but instead fostering understanding.” Positive perception of the company was reported by 75% of respondents, despite their experience of mass outages. While Rozetka was able to maintain service quality, it had begun to lose its emotional relevance. “What our consumers value most is feeling supported, knowing that we aren't indifferent and that we truly understand what Ukrainians need.” The project shifted Rozetka's reputation from functional (fast, reliable, convenient) to an emotionally connected, socially responsible national leader.

McDonald's Recruits Influencers to Recruit Gen Z

One of the less talked about consequences of the Russian assault on Ukraine is the impact on the labor market. By different estimates, anywhere from three to eight million Ukrainians fled the country in the first year of war, another 5 million were internally displaced, and more than a million were mobilized by 2024.

For employers like McDonald's, which resumed operations in Ukraine in the third quarter of 2022 having retained most employees even while restaurants were closed, staff turnover remained at the normal level for the quick service restaurant sector, which meant the company needed to hire several thousand new employees a year-a problem exacerbated by the opening of 30 new restaurants by the end of 2025.

For the first time, the company sought to recruit minors, aged 16 and 17-a notoriously difficult group to reach. The company had to not only introduce a new opportunity, but make it appealing and exciting for young people and acceptable to their parents.

So the company teamed up with five influencers to convey a simple message: at McDonald's, mistakes are part of learning, and every new team member gets support and time to grow. The influencers created video showing everyday, lighthearted“oops” moments, and the company gave them full creative freedom to make the content fun and relatable.

“Communications has always involved a degree of unpredictability, but the war has amplified this significantly,” says Miroslava Gribova, managing director at Be-it Agency, which has worked with McDonald's in Ukraine for more than seven years.“Ukrainian audiences expect brands to demonstrate empathy and awareness of the broader context.”

After more than four years of war, people are“emotionally exhausted, overwhelmed by constant news, and often unsure who to trust,” Gribova says.“As a result, we place even greater emphasis on message calibration.”

For that reason, every element of a company's campaign must answer an important question:“Can any element unintentionally trigger part of the audience?”

At the same time, the target audience for this campaign was Gen Z, who continue to live in a digital-first world, engaging with gaming, social media content, and influencer culture despite the war.

“To reach them effectively, we had to meet them where they are, using formats that are entertaining, engaging, and native to their environment.” Gribova says.“This created a natural tension. Content that captures attention for this audience is often bold, unexpected, sometimes pushing boundaries. But in a wartime context, brands cannot afford to appear tone-deaf or overly provocative. Communication today needs to support and offer hope, rather than add tension or uncertainty.”

Campaign planning also needed to acknowledge the dynamic nature of the environment.“We continuously monitor the situation in the country: whether there are major attacks, casualties, or days of mourning in specific regions. On such days, we pause or reschedule campaign activities.”

Even production required flexibility. All influencer content was filmed in McDonald's restaurants, where strict safety protocols are in place.“During air raid alerts, restaurants close and both staff and visitors must move to shelters. This meant that even basic logistics-such as scheduling shoots-had to be coordinated in real time, depending on the security situation.”

Despite these challenges, the result was a series of playful, honest videos that clearly showed what it's like to work at McDonald's without feeling forced or overly corporate. The campaign generated a 60% increase in job applications so that by the end of the year 10% of all restaurant employees are 16 or 17 and turnover among that group is lower than the overall rate.

Mastercard Helps Ukrainians Find Their “Third Wind”

By 2024, the third year of the war, Ukraine topped the global depression ranking. According to sociological research, 44% of Ukrainians rated their mental health as unsatisfactory. Yet despite the creation of several mental health initiatives, the topic remains sensitive and complex, and most communication around it is serious and heavy in tone.

At the same time, Mastercard-with its iconic“Priceless” platform-had always focused on inspiration, joy, energy and passion. Entering the mental wellbeing space risked contradicting that positioning and required the company and its agent, Gres Todorchuk, to strike a delicate balance.

“Launching Third Wind, an immersive exhibition dedicated to mental wellbeing, during the full-scale war meant operating in an environment of constant uncertainty, which defined every stage of the project,” says Natalia Baidala, marketing director for Mastercard Ukraine and Moldova.“It required a high degree of flexibility and the ability to plan and execute with multiple contingencies in mind, including safety protocols and power-outage risks.”

Beyond the obvious operational complexity, she says,“the defining challenge was working with the highly sensitive topic of mental wellbeing during an active war-and finding the right way to approach it to create a positive, restorative experience focused on mental recovery.”

The company's educational mental wellbeing platform Third Wind-at a time when it feels like the second wind isn't enough and people need to find their“third wind”-aimed at providing Ukrainians with tools for self-support and care, helping Ukrainians engage with the topic openly through experience rather than instruction, and offering a safe space that people needed in order to restore emotional energy and inner resilience.

“During wartime, people live under constant pressure-responsibility, stress, fear, and anxiety-while moments of joy, lightness, and happiness can feel almost out of place” says Baidala.“Yet these emotions are essential for mental wellbeing and recovery. For a brand built on the idea of Priceless moments, this insight became a natural continuation of Mastercard's positioning.”

The campaign was built on a clear insight: true“third wind” emerges when people reconnect with themselves and their inner lives, particular by allowing themselves a return to the wonder, surprise, and joy of childhood.

So in close collaboration with leading Ukrainian psychologists and world-renowned experts, Mastercard designed an exhibition, a carefully curated journey from understanding and recognizing emotions, to expressing and releasing them, and ultimately reconnecting with a sense of childlike joy and hope that restores energy and helps people move forward.

In six weeks, the“Third Wind” exhibition welcomed more than 110,000 visitors, becoming one of the most attended cultural projects in Ukraine during the war. Through ticket sales, more than 5,000,000 UAH ($120,000) was donated to the Superhumans War Trauma Center, enabling psychological rehabilitation for more than 500 patients and their families.

Using AI technology in the Childhood Joy zone, the PR team recorded emotional responses: levels of expressed happiness and joy increased 3.5 times. Ukrainians recognized Mastercard as a brand that“improves my confidence,”“gives me inner calm,” and“cares about me.”

Says Baidala,“Third Wind reinforced Mastercard's role as a long-term partner in Ukraine's resilience and recovery. In a country living through war, supporting mental wellbeing means supporting people's capacity to work, create, rebuild communities, and shape the future. The project strengthened Mastercard's emotional connection with Ukrainians and reinforced key emotional attributes for the brand.”

DTEK Turns Employees Into Heroes Amid Power Outages

Power outages in Ukraine, caused by sustained Russian attacks on energy infrastructure, intensified in October 2025 and reached unprecedented levels by December. As a result, public sentiment monitoring showed a sharp rise in negative emotions and collective fatigue, creating an urgent need for response from the country's largest energy supplier.

“In such an environment, any public communication carried elevated reputational risks,' says Felix Zinchenko, head of communications and NGO engagement for DTEK. The wrong tone could increase negativity and erode trust.

But for DTEK,“the question was not whether to communicate, but how to do so in a way that remained appropriate and relevant.”

While continuing its ongoing communications imperatives, reporting on recovery efforts after attacks, explaining outage schedules, and maintaining constant contact with millions of customers, there was an additional and more complex challenge, Zinchenko says:“How to move beyond purely service-driven communication and engage with society on an emotional level, not triggering irritation, but instead fostering understanding, support, and trust.”

Against this backdrop,“The Light Holds On” campaign was launched as a crisis response, with the aim of transforming irritation and fatigue into gratitude towards energy workers who restore power every day.

But there was another challenge: the absence of a clear end to the crisis.“This was not a one-off incident,” says Zinchenko,“but a prolonged situation without a defined horizon, requiring a fundamentally different approach to messaging. We deliberately shifted the focus from the company to its people, the energy workers who restore electricity every day under the threat of attacks.”

And finally,“a further task was to find a language that would resonate equally with two fundamentally different audiences. For Ukrainians, this was a deeply emotional context, where everyone was personally affected by the crisis. For international audiences, it was a complex reality that needed to be made understandable and relatable without over-explaining.”

So the campaign relied on cultural symbols and imagery that required no translation: music, monuments, and people at work. It was built around three symbolic activations united by a single idea: telling the story of light through the people who restore it; a Christmas tree made of helmets and energy workers' uniforms became a public space for expressing gratitude to those who go to work every day under the threat of new attacks; and a projection on the Motherland Monument reading“Light Holds” transformed one of the country's most recognizable symbols into an image of collective resilience.

Finally, a live performance of“Shchedryk”-known in the West as the Christmas carol "Carol of the Bells"-held outdoors at a thermal power plant destroyed by Russian strikes connected the scale of destruction with the people who continue restoring electricity against all odds and delivered the message to international audiences.

Says Zinchenko,“Culture became a unifying language that allowed us to speak about complex realities in a simple and relatable way.”

Brand awareness of DTEK reached a record high 96%, while trust increased to 70%, the highest level among energy companies in Ukraine. Positive perception of the company was reported by 75% of respondents, despite their experience of mass outages. Today, 73% of Ukrainians associate DTEK with“keeping the lights on” while 81% of respondents consider the profession of energy workers critically important.

“We were able to shift the emotional perception, from tension to support and gratitude,” Zinchenko says.“This change happened organically, through empathy and a shared sense of experience.”

Internationally, the campaign helped communicate the scale of the destruction of Ukraine's energy infrastructure to global audiences and translated that awareness into tangible support. In 2025, the total volume of international technical assistance provided to DTEK increased significantly.

Rozetka Restores a Cultural Artifact, and Hope

For three years after the start of the full-scale war, Rozetka, Ukraine's largest marketplace and one of the country's most recognizable national brands, previously known for its social initiatives, was largely absent from the public space. The company has prioritized operational survival: uninterrupted service, logistics and infrastructure, ensuring stability for millions of customers.

The company continued to support the country and its military but deliberately elected not to communicate publicly about these efforts. So while Rozetka was able to maintain service quality, it began to lose its emotional relevance and needed an initiative that would remind people that the company is a responsible business and a critical part of the social fabric of Ukraine.

“Our brand was born during the Orange Revolution, back when everyone said starting a business was impossible,” says Iryna Chechotkina, co-founder of Rozetka.“Since then, together with Ukraine we've been through multiple crises, the Revolution of Dignity, the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine, the occupation of Crimea, COVID and now we are going through a full-scale war together.”

Over the past decade of social initiatives, Chechotkina says, the company learned that“what our consumers value most is feeling supported, knowing that we aren't indifferent and that we truly understand what Ukrainians need. We needed to create something that wouldn't just generate sales or buzz but would deliver exactly what Ukrainians need right now: hope and the belief that everything lost will be restored. Not someday, but right now.

“We wanted to offer a spark of good news and give people a real way to be a part of it.”

The answer was to build on the brand's longstanding slogan“Always There.” And the strategy was to address the restoration of Ukraine's heritage, much of which had been systematically destroyed during the war. So the company decided to recreate Boryviter (pictured), a monumental mosaic in the town of Mariupol, heavily damaged during the Russian invasion.

“We were operating in the fourth year of Russia's full-scale invasion, with Ukrainians living through constant loss, exhaustion, and the daily destruction of their homes,” says Yaroslava Gres, co-founder and CEO of Gres Todorchuk, Rozetka's PR agency.“The challenge was to create not just a project, but a tangible symbol of hope, meaningful enough to engage a traumatized society as active participants, rather than just passive observers.”

Once the Boryviter mosaic was identified as that symbol, the PR team needed to authentically recreate the masterpiece exactly as it existed in occupied Mariupol, with zero physical access to the original. This included sourcing rare authentical materials like 1960s smalt, engaging experts who had studied the original piece and engineering a mechanical solution to make a massive, heavy mosaic entirely mobile so it could take to the road as a tool for international cultural diplomacy.

Says Chechotkina,“We certainly planned for Boryviter to generate a positive emotional response, but we could've never predicted how much it would do not only for society, but for the brand as well. Without spending a single dollar on media, the project delivered 120 million organic contacts, $1.1M in earned media value, and raised over 4 million UAH for the second mosaic and the international tour of Boryviter.”

The project also affected brand perception, shifting Rozetka's reputation from a functional one (fast, reliable, convenient marketplace) to an emotionally connected, socially responsible national leader.

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