On Monday, Ukraine turns thirty-five.
On 24 August 1991, in an ordinary school notebook and in about ninety minutes, Levko Lukyanenko drafted the text that the Verkhovna Rada adopted that same day by 346 votes. In December, more than ninety per cent of voters confirmed it in a referendum. That is the arithmetic. Thirty-five years, and the fifth summer in which the country has had to defend the answer.
In Kyiv this year the programme is quieter than the number suggests. Under martial law there is no guaranteed day off, so 24 August is a working Monday for most people, and what has been announced leans toward exhibitions, commemorations and charitable initiatives rather than crowds. A large stadium concert planned for the day was moved to 2027 because the venue lacks adequate shelter. Lviv, my Lviv, has published a programme running 21 to 25 August. Kyiv’s list was still being assembled a week ago.
Here, on this side of the water, the gathering happens where people can reach it. Below is what I have been able to confirm, with the links written out in full so you can copy them, share them, or check them yourself.
Kamloops
Monday 24 August, 6:00 to 7:00 p.m., in front of Kamloops City Hall on Victoria Street.
Flags, vyshyvankas, music. Then everyone walks down to Riverside Park together for Music in the Park, which plays free at the Rotary Bandshell at 7:00 p.m. every night from 1 July to 31 August.
Music in the Park schedule: https://www.kamloops.ca/our-community/news-events/events-calendar/music-park
So the evening is built to be easy: one hour on the steps, then a concert in the park with the same people. The poster says it plainly. Everyone is welcome. Ласкаво просимо всіх!
I want to sit with that for a moment, because it is a small piece of civic genius. Standing at City Hall is the part that says we are here and this is our country. Walking down to the bandshell afterward is the part that says and we are also your neighbours, and this is our town, and there is music tonight. Both halves matter. An hour at City Hall on a Monday in August is not a large thing to ask of anyone.
And every Saturday at 3:00 p.m.
This is the part I most want you to take away from this post. Monday is the anniversary, but in Kamloops we gather every Saturday at three, and we have done so without missing a week since 24 February 2022. That is more than two hundred and thirty Saturdays. Rain, snow, smoke, minus twenty, plus forty. Some weeks there are thirty of us and some weeks there are six.
If Monday does not work for you, Saturday always does. If Monday does work for you, come Saturday too, and then come the Saturday after that. An anniversary is one day a year. What actually holds a community together is the ordinary week.
Vernon
Sunday 23 August, 5:00 p.m., Paddlewheel Park.
Hosted by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress Thompson Okanagan Branch with the Sadok Ukrainian Dance Ensemble of Vernon, supported by the Community Foundation North Okanagan Neighbourhood Small Grant programme. Thompson Okanagan is our branch, and Kamloops sits inside it.
Kubassa in a bun, salad and cake. Bring a favourite Ukrainian dish if you have one. Donations to the Canada-Ukraine humanitarian aid fund will be accepted, and the Vernon Ukrainian Language School is running games for the children afterward.
To register, email: ucctobranch@gmail.com
Full details in the Vernon Morning Star: https://vernonmorningstar.com/2026/08/14/35th-anniversary-of-ukraine-independence-celebrated-in-vernon/
The framing is what moves me. The branch has built the evening around a campaign of gratitude called Thank You For Standing With Ukraine, aimed not only at Ukrainians but at everyone who showed up over four and a half years. As the branch put it, millions of people around the world have become allies. That is a different posture from asking. After this long, it is the right one, and it is also a reminder that the war has not ended just because it has left the front page.
Kelowna, and the exhibition that was in Kamloops last year
Sunday 23 August, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m., pedestrian bridge over Harvey Avenue near the Parkinson Recreation Centre. A rally for the 35th anniversary, up on the overpass where the traffic can see you.
Listing: https://www.castanet.net/events/ukrainian_independence_day_rally/153388
Saturday 22 August, 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Rotary Centre for the Arts, Kelowna. The day before the rally, the War Up Close virtual reality museum and Children’s Art Showcase comes to Kelowna. Admission is free and donations are welcome so the organisers can keep touring.
War Up Close: https://warupclose.com/
Williams Lake Tribune coverage by Khushi Arora: https://wltribune.com/2026/08/19/ukraines-35th-independence-year-brings-war-up-close-vr-to-kelowna/
We had this in Kamloops last year, and I want to tell you what it is before you decide whether to go, because “virtual reality war exhibition” sounds like something it is not.
There are no bodies. There is no blood. Olena Heichenko, who coordinates the project in Canada, is careful about this and says so directly: what the headsets show is destruction, not corpses. Streets, homes, schools, museums, hospitals. Panoramic photography and drone footage, three hundred and sixty degrees, so that when you turn your head the ruin keeps going. That is the entire trick, and it is not a trick at all. A photograph has edges, and edges let you put a thing down. A panorama has none. You stand inside it, and the only way out is to take the headset off, which is a choice nobody living in Kharkiv or Kherson has ever been offered.
Mykola Omelchenko, who co-founded the museum and shot much of the panoramic work, is insistent that this is not art. It is evidence. Photographers went into these places and risked themselves to record what was done, and the record is being kept so that one day it can be used. Heichenko says visitors sometimes stay for hours, and that they come out saying it felt like being there. I believe that, because I watched it happen in Kamloops. People went in politely, the way Canadians go into a community hall, and came out quiet.
The second half is the part I did not expect to be the harder one. Alongside the headsets is the Sunflower Dreams Project: paintings by children from eastern and southern Ukraine who are now displaced inside their own country, living in Lviv. The programme grew out of the work of Nataliia Pavliuk, an art lecturer at Lviv Polytechnic, and her daughter Yustyna, who use making art as a way through trauma. David Elley, who co-founded the project, points out that after four years some of these children have known nothing but bombing and fear.
And then you look at the paintings, and they are the brightest things in the room. Elley describes them as “filled with resilience, hope, and love”. He is not exaggerating. The children use the loudest colours in the box. You walk from a headset showing a flattened school to a wall of sunflowers painted by a nine-year-old who no longer has a home, and the gap between those two rooms is the whole war in about four metres.
Go, if you can. Take somebody who says they cannot picture it.
Kelowna at one and Vernon at five are both doable from Kamloops in a single Sunday, and the exhibition is the Saturday before, which makes a proper weekend of it.
Fraser Valley
Abbotsford, Saturday 22 August. Rally at 1:00 p.m., picnic at 3:00 p.m.
Hosted by RIY Vancouver, and open to everyone, on or off Facebook.
It starts at Abbotsford City Hall at 1:00 p.m. with a rally: standing together to show that Ukraine is not alone, to support the defenders, and to remind the world that the fight for freedom is still going on.
Then at 3:00 p.m. everyone moves to Mill Lake Park, Shelter #4, 33015 Bevan Avenue for a picnic. Food, drinks, music, and a proper afternoon for families. Wear a vyshyvanka. Bring your people. All money raised on the day goes to support Ukraine.
Event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1329364909405911
Organiser, RIY Vancouver: https://www.facebook.com/RIYVancouver
I want to point out something about the shape of this one, because I only noticed it after writing the Kamloops section. Abbotsford is doing exactly what Kamloops is doing, two days earlier and in a different city, with nobody coordinating between them. City Hall first, the seat of local government, where you stand and are counted and the thing is serious. Then everybody walks to a park and eats. The civic half and the human half, in that order, arrived at independently by two communities four hours apart. That is not a programme somebody designed. That is what people do when they need to be both a political fact and a neighbourhood on the same afternoon.
Langley, Sunday 23 August, 4:30 to 9:30 p.m., Otter Trail Winery, 5974 248 Street, Langley Township.
A ticketed evening rather than a park gathering: family-style dinner cooked by Chef Iryna Piguliak, with pampushky, white borsch, shashlik, varenyky and Kyiv cake, plus live music from Marian Hrynyshyn and Maria Kravchenko-Lugachiova and dancing from the Mriya Dance Ensemble. Tickets are $98, children six to twelve are $25, and toddlers are free but must still be registered.
Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ukrainian-day-at-otter-trail-winery-tickets-1994899496094
Victoria and the Island
Victoria is holding a picnic, as it does every year. The Greater Victoria gathering has historically been at Beckwith Park in Saanich on the weekend, an afternoon of food, singing, games for children and adults, and a chance for newcomers and long-settled Ukrainian Canadians to meet each other. Check the branch’s event page below for this year’s confirmed time and place rather than taking last year’s details to the park and hoping.
UCC Victoria event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1533652841473331
And every Tuesday at 5:00 p.m. at the Legislature.
Victoria does what Kamloops does, on a different day. Week after week, on the lawn in front of the Legislature building, five o’clock. If you live in Greater Victoria and have been meaning to go to something, you do not need to wait for an anniversary. Tuesday is coming.
Vancouver
The pattern in recent years has been an afternoon family picnic at Sunset Beach followed by an evening rally on the Burrard Bridge, where a long blue and yellow ribbon gets unspooled along the sidewalk. In January the same community lit that bridge for Unity Day to draw attention to the winter blackouts.
I will be there. This is the one I am travelling for. If you are in Vancouver on Sunday and you see somebody at Sunset Beach who looks like he has driven a long way to stand on a lawn, come and say hello. I would rather meet you there than have you read about it here.
Beyond BC
Toronto, Saturday 22 August, Centennial Park, Etobicoke, 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. The 35th annual commemoration, the largest of its kind in North America, hosted by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress Toronto Branch. Youth concert from 11:00 to 1:00, outdoor stage show from 1:00 with dance groups and musicians, food court, vendors’ marketplace, children’s play centre, headliner in the evening. Ten dollar donation at the gate, free parking until it fills.
Listing: https://nowtoronto.com/event/commemorating-ukrainian-independence-day-2/
UCC Toronto: https://ucctoronto.ca/
Seattle, Saturday 29 August, noon to 10:00 p.m., Seattle Center. A free all-day community picnic hosted by the Ukrainian Association of Washington State, open to the public. Closer to Kamloops than Toronto, if anyone is heading south.
For Ukraine itself, the fullest picture I found of what is planned in Kyiv, Lviv and Zhytomyr: https://ukrmedia.news/en/suspilstvo/den-nezalezhnosti-ukrainy-2026-zakhody/
And practical guidance for anyone who happens to be in Kyiv: https://visitkyiv.com/sights-and-landmarks/ukraine-independence-day/
One item made me smile: there is a national family recipe competition to establish a shared Independence Day cake. Thirty-five years in, a country is still inventing its traditions. That is not a weakness. That is what a living culture looks like.
Monday at seven, on the 50th parallel
Then on Monday I go north, and this is the invitation I most want to extend, because it is the one nobody needs a car for.
Monday 24 August, 7:00 p.m. Pacific, on Zoom. Ukraine Independence Day at the 50th Parallel.
I will be joining from Campbell River, which sits almost exactly on the 50th parallel. So does Ukraine. Draw the line east from that beach on Vancouver Island and it runs through the top of Zakarpattia and on across the country. Kyiv is a little above it. Kharkiv is a little below. It is a coincidence of geography and it means nothing at all, and I have never once been able to stop thinking about it while standing there. The same line. The same latitude of light in late August.
The call is not a programme. There is no agenda, no speakers, no slides. It is people saying hello to each other from wherever they happen to be that evening, which after four and a half years is scattered across a lot of places. Some are in Kamloops, some in Lviv, some in kitchens in cities I have never visited. Fifteen minutes or an hour, whatever you have.
If you are in Kamloops, go to City Hall at six instead. The Zoom is for the people who cannot get to a park.
Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86963288106?pwd=jKDDrcdPqZJ94UNQc5Q4xmbj7auLTJ.1
Meeting ID: 869 6328 8106 Passcode: 00000
A note before you go
Two practical things. Southern BC is under wildfire smoke this week, so check the air quality before you commit to two hours outdoors on a bridge, especially with children or elders. And confirm times with the organisers, because community events move.
One less practical thing. Thirty-five years is a generation. There are adults now who have never known a Ukraine that belonged to anyone else, and there are children in Kamloops and Vernon and Kelowna who arrived here in 2022 and have spent a third of their lives away from home. Both of those facts sit inside the same anniversary.
You do not have to be Ukrainian to come. That is the whole point of the Vernon invitation and of the line at the bottom of the Kamloops poster. Bring a dish, bring a flag, bring somebody who has been meaning to ask you about the war and has not known how.
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