The governments of Great Britain and Canada have funded the British company IN2 for over three years, which supports the resistance movements “Yellow Ribbon” and “Evil Mavka” operating in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. At the same time, the activists were encouraged to carry out tasks, ignoring warnings of danger.
This is stated in the Kyiv Independent investigation, which lasted several months.
Journalists point out that activists who want to join the “Yellow Ribbon” and “Evil Mavka” initiatives are offered tasks in “nonviolent resistance.” These include listening to Ukrainian songs, taking photos of pro-Ukrainian symbols, and burning Russian flags in public places during the TOT, which is obviously dangerous.
At the same time, recruitment to the “Yellow Ribbon” takes place through an unencrypted bot in the Telegram messenger. Investigators tried to use it: registration and familiarization with the security rules took 13 minutes, and the list of security protocols was not mandatory.
As noted in the investigation, in 2022–2023, the Yellow Ribbon repeatedly publicly announced the arrests and murders of its activists, but in recent years the organization has been silent on this issue.
In response to journalists' requests for data on activists who were tortured, killed, or disappeared, they denied that such cases existed. At the same time, the Yellow Ribbon acknowledged only “isolated cases of detention,” which contradicts the organization's public statements for the specified period.
Kyiv Independent has found out that the resistance movement “Yellow Ribbon” and the women's partisan movement “Evil Mavka” are supported by the British company IN2, which is based in Dubai.
In response to a request, IN2 denied that “any of the program's activities led to the arrests, torture, or death of Yellow Ribbon activists.”
However, investigators gained access to a dossier of evidence allegedly compiled by the Ukrainian military in 2025. It documented several cases of imprisonment, rape, and murder of Yellow Ribbon activists during 2023, 2024, and 2025.
Also, according to this data, in one case, a 24-year-old woman from Melitopol, who participated in the “Evil Mavka” missions, disappeared on the instructions of Russian special services – her body was found two months later.
In addition, there is information about Crimean Ksenia Svetlyshyna in the public domain. On September 3, 2024, a Russian court in occupied Sevastopol sentenced her to 13 years in prison for her activities for the “Yellow Ribbon”.
Another activist of the movement, Sevil Veliyeva, was arrested in 2024 for taking photos of Ukrainian symbols in occupied Melitopol – Russian special services were able to track her down by determining the geolocation of the photos and reviewing video from surveillance cameras. However, the woman was later released, she told her story to Suspilny.
In a comment to Kyiv Independent, an unnamed representative of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense said that the organizers of the movement “unreasonably endanger the lives of their activists and profit from it.”
Financing of the British company IN2
As journalists found out, IN2 received funding from the governments of Great Britain and Canada. According to open documents of the Canadian government, payments to IN2 for 2022/2023 and 2023/2024 amounted to a total of 2,327,000 Canadian dollars (1,700,955 US dollars). There is no public data on how much of this money went to support the Yellow Ribbon and Evil Mavka organizations.
However, Kyiv Independent sources claim that the main concern of those involved in IN2 was to maintain Western funding, not the safety of activists. Thus, when funding from the Canadian government ended in 2024, the company turned to the UK for additional money.
London then funded IN2 for four months in 2025. The firm received several hundred thousand pounds. Senior IN2 staff were also paid significant amounts from this money – in particular, the project manager received a daily rate of 616 pounds ($833), while network directors such as British journalist David Patrikarakos received 800 pounds ($1,080) per day.
According to a special forces representative, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity, the actual cost of maintaining the “Yellow Ribbon” could reach “a maximum of $20,000 per month.”
British funding was cut after a number of individuals raised concerns about the operational security of the program, the employment of unqualified staff, and whether it was an effective use of British taxpayers' money, leading to an internal investigation by the British Foreign Office (FCDO).
This concern about the functioning and funding of the program has led to an internal investigation by the Special Operations Forces of Ukraine (SSO), which coordinates the resistance movement to the TOT. They confirmed to journalists that they had questioned Lieutenant Colonel Andriy Klimin, who, according to the publication's sources, participated in the Yellow Ribbon operations. Kyiv Independent has also reached out to Patrikarakos and other leaders of the movement, but has not yet received a response.
Meanwhile, in late February, when journalists were conducting this investigation, a representative of the Yellow Ribbon, who called himself Ivan, announced in an interview with the Ukrainian publication Ukraїner about a significant change in the organization's standard operating procedures. He also acknowledged that, in particular, the publication by activists of photos with pro-Ukrainian symbols by the movement poses a “huge risk.”
UPDATED 15:35
The head of the supervisory board of the Ukrainian Institute, Hanna Shelest, who participated in consulting IN2 on the organization of the “Yellow Ribbon” and “Evil Mavka” movements, responded to the Kyiv Independent investigation. She denied the accusations made against her by journalists in the material.
Shelest said that the Kyiv Independent used a “fake report” and “lying witnesses” to investigate. She also accused the journalists of publishing her quotes from a conversation she had with the publication ” off the record .” Off the record, or off the record, is a journalistic term that refers to information that a source gives to a journalist on the condition that it will not be published, disclosed, or linked to the name of the person who said it. “
“This article began with the pouring out of a “report” to journalists, which we knew about back in the fall, and which contains a bunch of lies, interspersed with statements that may draw on the CCP article on espionage and disclosure of state secrets. I know who the author is, I still don't know the motives, but I know that those to whom it was sent refused it, as did the company where the author worked. The journalists referred to this “dossier” in their letter to me, but for some reason they didn't write about it in the article. A lot of the information that the journalists then asked about and cited as sources is from that text,” said Hanna Shelest.
What kind of “report” is this and who its authors are – Hanna Shelest did not provide details. However, Hanna Shelest claims that “the case from Melitopol described in the article” (about the death of the activist – ed.) is supposedly “a case from the same report.”
She also stated that the funding figures provided in the investigation “are erroneous,” that the journalists “don't know what was included” and “for some reason they are drawing conclusions” that all this funding was for “Yellow Ribbon.”
Hanna Shelest also stated that the SSO “cannot conduct an investigation into her.” She stated that the SSO “requested one piece of information, to which they received a response 3 days later.” The Kyiv Independent investigation refers to an internal investigation by the Special Operations Forces into Lieutenant Colonel Klimin's interaction with the Yellow Ribbon movement. The SSO, as part of its internal investigation, reached out to Hanna Shelest for information, but as of mid-April “has not yet received a response.”
Shelest confirmed that she has been helping the Yellow Ribbon movement since 2022. According to her, she helped attract funding and expertise from a British company. Anna Shelest claims that she continued to help the movement for 4 years and no one knew about it, which is a “success of the project” for her. “In fact, it was not just a project, it was part of life, not work, because they worked both before funding, and in periods without it, and after it,” Anna Shelest emphasized.