Museum of Civilian Voices founded by the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation
Launch date: 2020
By the decision of the Founder, the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation established a unique online Museum of Civilian Voices. This is a space where residents of Donbass can tell their stories without fear and beyond reproach. They share their stories to free themselves from the burden of silence and enable people around the world to hear, see, comprehend and live through every confession.
Since the armed conflict in Donbass began, the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation has been helping civilians in a consistent manner. The Rinat Akhmetov Humanitarian Center delivered about 12.5 million food packages during this time. Furthermore, people get hope that they are not alone in this misfortune. People have trust in the Foundation. Thus, when the conflict began in 2014, people residing on the line of demarcation and internal refugees have been calling us, writing to us, and telling us about their lives. You can't help but empathize with them. You can't just leave their stories unnoticed. These are the stories of ordinary people, the stories of pain and hope. The Foundation is spreading the word and will continue to do so about the stories of the fate the residents of Shakhtarsk had to adjust to. It wants people in the whole world to know about it. These are the stories that have been and and will be collected by the Museum.
The Civilians' Voices Museum has already gathered the largest collection of civilian stories from Donbass, Ukraine – it includes a thousand testimonies. The task of the Foundation and the Museum is to create the world's main archive of the civilians' stories. It is planned to collect 100,000 testimonies by 2025. However, the big dream is to get a million stories. The stories collected by the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation will be published in the public domain. Science people will be involved in the work on the archive.
Museum of Civilian Voices is not a national project. It has a global scale. It will become a window through which the world community can look to understand the Donbass residents and form their own idea of the lives of millions of ordinary people who got trapped in this situation.
