24 February 2026

The big Rose Monday carnival parade in Cologne was already cancelled for 2022 due to Covid when russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on the 24th of February. Instead, and Covid be damned, 250,000 people assembled for a rally. I was among them, dazed and incredulous that such a thing could happen, at this day and age in Europe. And naively confident that European leaders would step up to end this aggression.

In the summer of that year, my daughter started at school as a first grader. In her class – a boy from eastern Ukraine. As the kids in class got to know each other, she came home one day with a casual question: “Mom, if we have to flee, which of my toys can I bring?”

Nothing could have had more impact than this simple question. It brought the abstract horror of the war literally close to home. Other parents, just like me, having to make that choice to keep their children safe. I wanted to do something, anything. Even what little I could do had to be better than just sitting and watching.

This is how I ended up in Lviv in July 2023. I had come to help in the Lviv Volunteer Kitchen, which makes dry food for the soldiers since the first russian invasion in 2014. A bit of a selfish reason, too. I needed to feel less helpless. And to give what I could in time, work and support. In the volunteer kitchen I met many people, dedicated to fight russia in various ways. Foreigners like me, and of course the local Ukrainians, using what free time they had to prepare food for the soldiers, making camouflage nets, sending much needed goods to the frontlines. Later I also met David and Kate, who had found yet another way of helping and advocating for support, by bringing the pictures created by Ukrainian children in an art healing class for the world to see. The Sunflower Dreams Project now has exhibitions all over the world and I am very grateful to be a small part of that too. And somehow it all circles back to the voices of children. The pictures are beautiful and colorful and bright, they bring a smile to the faces of people looking at them. But they tell a deeper story about what they had lost, what they remembered, and what they now hope for. And these hopes are what we all should listen to and work for.

Christina

This 24th of February, I have chosen to remember and think about the origin of this Project, The Sunflower Dreams Project, and how it grew from the desires of some like-minded, compassionate people who wanted to 'Stand With Ukraine' any way they could.

My involvement with Ukraine began in November 2013, when pro-russian Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, sent the Berkut riot police to violently disperse student protesters in Kyiv. The students were protesting his refusal to sign a cooperation agreement with the EU.

Those events sparked the Euromaidan protests—mass demonstrations for closer ties with Europe, against corruption, and for the right to choose Ukraine’s own future. During that time, I connected through online platforms with Tanya, a protester living in Kyiv with her son. Through her, I no longer saw Ukraine as a geopolitical “pawn” and I began to understand it as a wonderful country with deep history, strong identity, and a determination to be free and democratic.

My turning point was watching a concert by Okean Elzy on Maidan Square in December 2013, where hundreds of thousands Ukrainian people sang the national anthem together. Herting this anthem for the first time, it was clear to me that this was a society ready to struggle for its rights, freeing itself from oppression and corruption and building its children’s future. A society that had a hunger that we in the West have perhaps lost.

In 2014, as russia escalated its aggression in eastern Ukraine and moved to seize Crimea and parts of the Donbas and Luhansk regions, an information war unfolded alongside the fighting. I countered disinformation on social networks, especially after the downing of the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17. The aircraft was shot down by a russian Buk surface-to-air missile launched from territory controlled by russian-backed forces. This terrorist attack killed 298 civilians.

Later, I joined NAFO (North Atlantic Fellas Organisation), an online community that counters pro-russian propaganda and raises funds to support Ukraine. In fact, I was already doing that work before NAFO and their members - “Fellas” - existed.

After russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, I continued working online as part of NAFO—connecting fundraisers, supporting equipment donations, and doing my share of “bonking,” i.e. exposing russian propaganda and setting out the facts plainly and with ridicule for the propagandists, that we call vatniks.

Later in 2023, I connected with foreign volunteers on the ground in Ukraine and had also reconnected with Tanya, who was now living in Nice, France. In early January 2024, I travelled to Ukraine to volunteer. I suggested to Tanya that above all else, I could visit Ukrainian schools, meet children, and ask them to create paintings. I would then bring those artworks back to the UK and the EU countries to exhibit them and raise awareness of the war and the struggle of Ukrainians on their path to freedom.

Tanya loved the idea. She offered to help launch the programme in Nice through AFUCA (the French Association of Ukrainians on the Côte d’Azur), working with Ukrainian children there. Thus, I travelled to Nice before I travelled to Ukraine for the first time to start what has become The Sunflower Dreams Project.

The kids in Nice were immediately eager to take part in the project. I promised to return in March 2024 to collect the paintings. Tanya's friend, Olena, connected me to people they knew in Kyiv and Lviv, to expand the project to schools and programmes supporting internally displaced children.

That is how that in Lviv I met two remarkable women - Nataliia and Yustyna Pavliuk. They run an “art-healing” programme for children who had fled their homes because of the war. Through painting and creative work, the children obtained a safe space to process trauma and regain a sense of stability. I felt the importance of the project and I immediately began raising funds to sustain and expand it.

Once I asked why they had not tried to exhibit the children’s artwork outside Ukraine—apart from a Chicago one, attended by several senior US politicians. Nataliia answered plainly: they had no contacts, no funding, and - before all - no time. Their entire focus was on helping children. Since February 2022, when tens of thousands of terrified families fled to Lviv, they had been running sessions two to three times a week, every week. Their priority was simple and relentless: give displaced children a safe space to process trauma and begin to heal.

That was when I committed. I had time, I could find the contacts ("I know people who know people") and I thought that “money is tomorrow's problem”. Shortly, I obtained first offers in the UK to host exhibitions of what we first called the "Children of War". More volunteers joined me, starting with Kate in Prague, who hosted our first-ever exhibition in April 2024. Subsequently, Thomas delivered a major exhibition in Vienna in July 2024. As word spread, other volunteers came forward: Daniele in Krakow; Eva and a community gallery near Seattle in the US; Soren in Denmark; Craig in Liverpool; and my big sister Lesley in Portsmouth. At time of writing, 20th of February 2026, exhibitions #34 and #35 are going to happen in Canada and Vienna: 12 years after the date Putin awarded the medals to the 'Little Green Men' - unmarked russian soldiers who seized Crimea in 2014 and ignited the war that continues to this day.

One thing all volunteers in The Sunflower Dreams Project have had in common since we became volunteers in Ukraine is the question we had been asking ourselves: “How can we reach more people and do more for Ukraine?” And this - showing the art of the children of Ukraine, the refugee kids who remain kids, despite everything they experience, retain the creativity, hopes and resilience of their parents and fellow countrymen and women - is our answer. We give the children a platform to speak for themselves — and to turn that visibility into support for Ukraine as a whole.

When do we stop? Perhaps, once the stories of the children no longer need to be told - unfortunately, that time may not come anytime soon. In the meanwhile, what happens to The Sunflower Dreams Project? One principle is crystal clear: the artwork and the stories must endure. We work towards creating a permanent digital archive of the paintings, the children´s testimonies, the exhibitions and the events we have organised, so that this piece of the history of what happened to children during this atrocity of a war exists afterwards. Not as a record of a project — but as a record of history.