Pavlo Vyshebaba

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Pavlo Vyshebaba, born on March 28, 1986, in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, is an environmental activist, writer and musician. He co-founded the One Planet NGO and serves as a UNDP envoy for tolerance in Ukraine.

Pavlo started studying engineering but switched to journalism at Mariupol State University. He worked for three years at the Priazovsky Rabochy newspaper, then moved to Kyiv in 2012 after graduating with honors. He took part in the Revolution of Dignity and worked in the press center of the National Resistance Headquarters. After the revolution, he worked in the government’s press service, dealing with international communication and relations between ministries. He chose to use Ukrainian instead of Russian, saying it was a stand against occupation of his city.

In 2013 he became a vegetarian and in 2015 a vegan, also giving up seafood and animal-made clothing. On April 13, 2016, he opened Ukraine’s first vegan café, One Planet. In August 2016 he started a musical group, the One Planet Orchestra, which plays original music about harmony between people and nature. In 2017, the orchestra raised over 45,000 hryvnias through crowdfunding to record an album, the first Ukrainian band to receive full public funding for an album.

In December 2016 he co-founded the One Planet public organization to end animal exploitation, ban fur farms, fight species discrimination and climate change. In 2017 Pavlo was elected UNDP ambassador for tolerance in Ukraine. He became well known for his anti-fur campaign KhutroOFF. In September 2018 a petition he started to ban fur production in Ukraine gathered 27,000 signatures, a record at that time. On November 26, 2018, opponents doused him with green tea at a rally against lifting the moose-hunting ban.

Early in 2019 he led the fight against a mink farm proposed by a Dutch company in Pidhirne, Volyn, and helped draft a bill banning fur production (No. 10019), which was registered in the Verkhovna Rada on February 7, 2019. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, he volunteered to fight in the Donbas with the Ukrainian Armed Forces. His poem “Please, do not write me about the war” gained attention, and in 2022 he published a poetry book of the same title. In interviews he cites Gandhi and Mandela as moral guides, and among Ukrainians he mentions Skovoroda and Shevchenko. As a child, he was not admitted to the Kramatorsk music school, later continuing his musical interests despite that early setback.