Ribas Hotels Group Joins the Charity Project “Flag of Independence”

Ribas Hotels Group has joined the charity project “Flag of Independence” and purchased three copies of the historic banner. They will hang in the company’s offices and remind us every day of what matters most: our strength lies in unity.

The project was carried out by the NGO Ukraine WOW and the Come Back Alive Foundation, with the support of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. For the 35th anniversary of independence, they recreated a thousand copies of the flag that members of parliament carried into the Rada’s session hall on 24 August 1991. A copy could be obtained with a charitable donation of UAH 40,000, and all the funds raised went towards ground-based robotic systems for Ukraine’s Defense Forces. Many Ukrainian businesses joined the initiative, including Aurora, OKKO, Accordbank, Namelaka and others.

The original flag has a special history. Soviet authorities persecuted the use of Ukrainian symbols, and fabric in the right colours was almost impossible to find, so activists of the People’s Movement of Ukraine sewed it in secret from whatever they could get. That is why the flag turned out sky blue rather than dark blue, and measured 7 metres 34 centimetres in length. It was recreated in exactly that form: a thousand copies took 26 kilometres of fabric and more than 2,000 hours of work, and every flag received its own number and a card signed by Ivan Zayets.

The entire run has now found its owners. For us, it is a chance to be part of a story that connects the memory of winning independence with support for those who defend it today.