"We Needed a Miracle, and We Found It. His Name is Oleksandr Usyk," says DTEK's Head of Strategic Communications

During his speech at the SBC Summit Ukraine 2024, DTEK's Head of Strategic Communications, Oleksandr Shevelev, spoke about the "Battle for Light" campaign, a joint initiative with undisputed world champion in two weight classes, Oleksandr Usyk, aimed at drawing global attention to Russian attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure.

"We understood that we faced a huge challenge on one hand, and on the other, we knew that accomplishing this within Ukraine alone was almost impossible. We needed to devise an approach—a big one that could capture, or rather, rekindle the world’s attention to Ukraine's embattled energy system.

Believe me, it’s an extremely non-trivial task. We’ve been in a full-scale war for three years now. Our Western partners have already received numerous communications, and there’s a lot of information noise and even some fatigue over the war in the West.

We knew we needed a miracle, literally. And we found that miracle, his name is Oleksandr Usyk. With just one call, Oleksandr agreed to be the voice of our energy workers during his historic fight.

We understood that this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. The last time there was a fight for all heavyweight championship belts was 25 years ago, and now the world’s attention was riveted on this match. We couldn’t and didn’t have the right to miss this opportunity, so we launched the massive project, ‘Battle for Light.’

What did we do? We started with a teaser, sharing a single post on Instagram on both Oleksandr Usyk’s and DTEK’s pages. Just a glove, just the words ‘Battle for Light,’ nothing else.

Afterward, we released a clarifying message. This was a video from Oleksandr, explaining what it was all about—why ‘Battle for Light’ and why boxing. In his video, Oleksandr essentially conveyed the message. That video alone received 3.5 million views.

Of course, there were many activities after that, culminating in Oleksandr’s entrance to the ring in his iconic outfit. His attire featured DTEK’s branding, and it quickly became viral content, amassing hundreds of thousands of organic views in the week leading up to the fight and on the night of the bout itself. It was incredibly effective," said Shevelev.