Museum of Civilian Voices is the world's largest archive of personal stories and a source of truth about the war in Ukraine directly from eyewitnesses. The Museum collects, preserves, and documents the stories of people who have experienced the consequences of war from 2014 to the present day.
The project concept was developed with the participation of renowned Ukrainian and international museum experts. The Museum was created according to the manifesto of the famous Turkish writer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Orhan Pamuk. The writer proclaims that the task of museums of the present and the future is to tell stories not about the state, but about the individual.
The Museum aims to preserve the memory of the war in Ukraine and document Russian war crimes for future trials against the aggressor country to establish justice. For several years, the Museum only operated online. At civilvoicesmuseum.org, the stories of civilians were available in the form of video, audio recordings, and text. By the end of 2025, the archive of the Museum of Civilian Voices by the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation already contains over 140 thousand firsthand stories.
The idea of establishing the Museum of Civilian Voices arose in response to the tragic events that began in Ukraine in 2014 â the Russian occupation of Crimea and the military operations in Eastern Ukraine. While providing humanitarian aid to war victims, the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation has encountered thousands of human stories. People living on the contact line and internally displaced persons called, wrote, and told the Foundation about the tragic events. These stories eventually inspired the creation of a digital archive.
In 2018, the archive was officially presented to the public. Fighting in Eastern Ukraine prevented the Museum from opening in Donetsk, so it was created online. Since 2014, the Museum has operated on the portal civilvoicesmuseum.org, publishing video, audio, and text stories.
In February 2020, the official collection of testimonies from civilians affected by the fighting in Donbas began. The Museum collected stories mainly from residents of the Donetsk region and Luhansk regions. The project concept was developed with the participation of renowned Ukrainian and international museum experts. One of them is Kevin Bolton, a British brand and web consultant who has worked with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and several European museum projects.
After the start of full-scale Russian aggression in February 2022, the Museum began actively documenting new crimes against civilians. Today, its archive contains testimonies from people from different parts of Ukraine. These are not only important documents for preserving oral history, but also materials that will be used in court proceedings. Some of the heroes whose stories have been archived have already testified at the People's Tribunal in The Hague in 2023.
Also, in 2024, the Museum expanded its activities and went offline, presenting the multimedia space of the Museum of Civilian Voices as part of the 'VOICES' exhibition. It was held at the Kyiv History Museum with an art installation by Gogolfest. The exhibition included artifacts of the heroes. Also, as part of the exhibition, the animated short film 'Mariupol: One Hundred Nights' was presented. Over 5,000 people visited the exhibition in three months. Among them were representatives of international media and organizations, Ukrainian journalists and cultural figures, Kyiv residents, and guests of the capital. For its work and significant contribution to the preservation of Ukraine's national memory, the Museum of Civilian Voices received a certificate of gratitude from the Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications. The âÂÂVOICESâ exhibition has also been recommended for display in Europe and the USA.
Another important offline event in 2024 was the documentary project 'War Diaries: Voices of Survivors and Those Who Did Not Survive', which was presented in the space of the Museum of Civilian Voices in Kyiv. It is based on the diaries of Kateryna Savenko and Volodymyr Velychko from Mariupol, which were donated to the Museum. These are stories with different endings that convey the tragedy of the war firsthand.
By the end of 2025, the Museum had collected over 140,000 stories. This made it the world's largest archive of testimonies from people affected by war. The material serves as a unique resource for historians, researchers, and journalists, as well as for writing books, making documentaries, feature films, and other projects that will help to preserve history.
Evgeniy Maloletka, a photojournalist and co-author of the film 20 Days in Mariupol: <blockquote>"This is a good exhibition. It conveys the mood. The whole scene with graphics shows reality in a strong and beautiful way. It has a good focus - that is, everything is shown as it was, because not everyone was at the epicenter of events and saw the whole picture with their own eyes. I hope that the exhibition will be exhibited abroad. Not everyone wants to see the grief that our country is experiencing, but people need to know about it. And transferring these events to a different plane is an important work done by the creators of the exhibition".</blockquote>
Dmytro Gordon, a Ukrainian journalist and TV presenter: <blockquote>"The exhibition is impressive. It made my heart skip a beat. Such exhibitions must take place because this is something you cannot see on the Internet or television. It evokes wild emotions that make a person human".</blockquote>
Pavlo Zibrov, a singer and Ukrainian artist: <blockquote>"We could not hold back our tears. There were many emotionsâÂÂdespair, regret, injustice, rage... This exhibition should be shown in all European capitals, to all foreigners, officials, and those who are already 'tired' and living in a different reality. It is extremely important! This is our history, which cannot be rewritten!".</blockquote>
The Museum of Civilian Voices is also actively working to popularize the stories of civilians who witnessed or were victims of war events through international platforms. The Museum organizes thematic events in European countries and Ukraine with the participation of world experts, conducts interviews with historians, artists, and specialists in the field of national memory preservation, collaborates with foreign universities in the fields of education and science, and supports documentary filmmakers. In particular, the diary of Kateryna Savenko, presented as part of the documentary project 'War Diaries: Voices of Survivors and Those Who Did Not Survive' has been translated into German and Spanish. All of this contributes to a better understanding of the experiences of Ukrainians who survived the horrors of war.
The theatre performance 'Faces of the Colour of War' is a story based on the memories of actors who managed to escape from the temporarily occupied Mariupol. The plot is based on the stories of the heroes of the Museum of Civilian Voices. The play will premiere on July 28, 2022, at the Theater on Podil in Kyiv. The main goal of the project is to remind the world of the Mariupol tragedy and to revive the work of its artists.
The documentary film 'Dram' was made by director and producer Yulian Ulybin in cooperation with the Museum of Civilian Voices. One of the film's protagonists, Liza, entrusted her story to the museum, which then passed it on to the film team. The film was presented at the 14th Odesa International Film Festival in 2023.
The short film 'Mariupol Survivors' won the Best International Film category at the annual Santa Fe Film Festival. The film includes fragments of three stories from the archives of the Museum of Civilian Voices, which tell the story of the tragedies experienced by the people of Mariupol.
The documentary '20 Days in Mariupol' was made by a Ukrainian team consisting of war correspondent, AP videographer, and director Mstyslav Chernov, photojournalist Yevhen Malolietka, and producer Vasilisa Stepanenko. In 2024, the film won an Oscar in the Best Documentary category. The film is based on the events in Mariupol in March 2022. The medics who saved lives during the blockade of the city entrusted their stories to the Museum of Civilian Voices.
In 2022, the Museum of Civilian Voices won The Drum Awards for Social Purpose in the Best Response to Change category!
In 2023, the International Public Relations Association (IPRA) announced the winners of the IPRA Golden World Awards â a prestigious international award in the field of public relations. The Museum of Civilian Voices won in all three categories in which it became a finalist: ⢠Community engagement; ⢠Country, region and city; ⢠NGO campaign.
Also, in 2023, the Museum of Civilian Voices by the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation became a member of the Oral History Association (OHA) â an international oral history association based in Waco, Texas, USA. The Museum is the first and, so far, the only representative of Ukraine in this community.