Risky actions of Ukraine’s secretive grassroots Yellow Ribbon movement recalled in Brussels exhibition
One night last June, Liliya Aleksandrova slipped out of her home in occupied Kherson with some bright paints and a dangerous idea. She went to a grocery shop in her neighbourhood, a business that she knew was frequented by Russian soldiers who had invaded the city months before. “Kherson is Ukraine,” she wrote on a metal fence near the shop. Then she added a golden swirl of paint – a yellow ribbon, the symbol of Ukraine’s resistance movement in the Russian-occupied territories.
“For sure it was scary, but she asked God to help her,” recounts an interpreter, who was summarising Aleksandrova’s account to the Guardian.
