Speak the Unspoken: LMF 2025 Highlights

This year’s LMF conference, under the focus theme “Speak the Unspoken: Choices, Decisions, Responsibility,” was the third edition of the conference held in a special format in an underground parking space. The program featured 24 main events (plus 11 additional sessions outside the main program) and included 58 speakers, moderators, and cultural program participants. Over 500 participants from 26 countries attended, including both Ukrainian and international media professionals, public intellectuals, researchers, politicians, diplomats, and representatives of civil society and international organizations.

As in 2023 and 2024, the key objectives of the conference were to:

The second and third days of the conference were split into two tracks — the worldview-oriented Frankly Spoken and the practical Smartly Done.

The conference’s focus theme brought with it another objective: to encourage participants and the audience to discuss and reflect on the need for honest and direct conversations about the real state of affairs in the world and the challenges posed by current geopolitical processes and trends. This theme was formulated even before the U.S. presidential elections, and the events following Donald Trump’s election confirmed its relevance. The core message of the theme was reflected in keynote addresses: Ukrainian analyst and military service member Kateryna Zarembo urged attendees to reflect on how they practice the democratic values they profess, while Greg Mills, Director of the Brenthurst Foundation and a geopolitical expert from South Africa, dedicated his speech to “theories of victory and peace in Ukraine” from a military science perspective.

The LMF cultural program was implemented both at the conference venue (exhibitions, interactive installations) and at other locations (tours, introductions to local cuisine). The program was developed by cultural manager and curator Yevheniia Nesterovych, with contributions from the Memory Platform “Memorial” project and the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, which presented their own installations. The artistic component at the venue highlighted Russian war crimes, the realities of life and work for media professionals, and the Russian-occupied territories as an integral part of Ukraine. As part of the cultural program, guests experienced not only Ukrainian culture but also other native cultures of Ukraine, including Jewish and Crimean Tatar traditions.

Despite being held in an underground parking lot for safety reasons—given that Russian aggression, including missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities, continues—the organizers made every effort to ensure the event space was well arranged and that the design conveyed the key messages of the focus theme. As Anne Applebaum noted: “The 2025 Lviv Media Forum, located in an elegant, well-designed bomb shelter/basement. Congratulations to organizers for a well-planned event.”

Over a Million Reaches and Hundreds of Materials: How LMF 2025 Was Covered

The content and information campaign for LMF 2025 reached over 1.48 million people. The conference involved 31 media partners from Ukraine and other countries. A total of 345 materials were produced, including more than 60 event summaries, interviews, and podcasts with speakers and participants. Conference coverage was published in Ukrainian, English, Chinese, Czech, Polish, German, Spanish, and Belarusian.

Topics LMF Made Public

LMF 2025 included several topics that are rarely or never publicly discussed in Ukraine, or whose discussion on international platforms lacks equal representation of Ukrainian voices and perspectives. Essentially, the conference aimed to bring these issues into public discourse in Ukraine and to put the Ukrainian point of view on the international agenda.

— A New Approach to Media Support. Back in 2024, when presenting its research “The Donor Field of Media Support in Ukraine” on X, Lviv Media Forum raised the question of changing the strategy and philosophy of media support both in Ukraine and in other countries where the media sector struggles and requires resources for development. At LMF 2025, the conversation about the principles of fair and effective media support in Ukraine (and beyond) continued.

Latvian media expert Rita Ruduša, who participated in the discussion on media support, noted: “We stressed the need to reinvent media development to fit the current pressures. Media managers and media CSOs have been saying this for years, but now it becomes existentially important—donors need to take steps to move away from the short-term project-based approach that drains administrative resources of newsrooms and impedes, rather than aids, development. Funding needs to be flexible and for longer periods, and investment in digital innovation is also a must. And last, but most certainly not least, donor coordination is not a bonus but a necessity. Not simply reporting who does what, but actually complementing each other's activities and building on what has already been achieved. Otherwise, we will see news deserts spreading at a breakneck speed, and, in Ukraine, the consequences may be fatal. Literally.”

— The Role of "Non-Putin Russians" for Ukraine. The discussion Exiled but Accountable: The Ukrainian Answer to the ‘Non-Putin Russians’ Dilemma, featuring Oleksandra Romantsova, Executive Director of the Center for Civil Liberties; Dmytro Zolotukhin, founder of the Institute of Post-Information Society; and Valerii Pekar, co-author of the Manifesto for Sustainable Peace, and moderated by Olga Dukhnich, expert at the Frontier Institute, became one of the first public conversations on this topic since the start of the full-scale war.

— The Weaponization of Corruption, Especially in the Ukrainian Context. A pressing question for Ukrainian media, politicians, and other communicators of the Ukrainian perspective abroad is how to address Russia’s propaganda framing Ukraine as “the most corrupt country” without losing sight of—or downplaying—the real problem of corruption in Ukraine, which is being tackled quite effectively. This issue was discussed during the panel Communicating Corruption: A Problem to Solve or a Weapon to Wield? by Andrii Borovyk, Executive Director of Transparency International Ukraine, and Ilana Bet-El, historian and strategic studies expert. A summary of the discussion was published by Ukrainian outlet Texty.org.ua.

— Honest, Human-Centered Communication. For the event Speak Human. How Business and Institutions Can Build Clear Public Communication, representatives from the state-owned Ukrainian Railways (Ukrzaliznytsia), the press office of Lviv City Council, and the private KredoBank were invited. Each of these organizations has experience moving away from rigid, bureaucratic language and embracing human-centered communication focused primarily on the audience’s needs. While at the state level the implementation of plain language in communications largely remains declarative, we are confident that the global plain-language trend will eventually reach Ukraine, and this discussion could help accelerate that process.

After LMF: Participants’ Experience