Paul McCartney's Independence Concert

At our invitation Sir Paul McCartney kindly gave a free Independence Concert in Kyiv, with the objective to unite the country and strengthen understanding within Ukrainian society.

Saturday June 14, 2008, at the invitation of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Paul McCartney gave a free concert in Independence Square, Kiev, Ukraine. This groundbreaking event has been named the Independence Concert.

Despite the thunderstorm and heavy rain, the Independence Concert given by Sir Paul McCartney in Kyiv’s central square was attended by over 350,000 people, a record number of spectators in Ukraine’s history. The concert was also beamed live to six major cities (Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovs’k, Sevastopol, Lviv, Donets’k and Odesa) across the Ukraine where over 195,000 people came out to watch the show. Over 13 million people also watched the live broadcast on television.

This exciting event was seen as symbolic by several generations of Ukrainians. It allowed people of different political persuasion and geopolitical leaning to come together over peace, love and unity; the very same ideas that Paul McCartney with The Beatles 30 years ago applied in helping to melt the ice of the ‘cold war' in millions of hearts and to change the world into a better place. The Independence Concert was an independent social initiative that aimed to unite Ukrainians and strengthen the understanding within Ukrainian society.

Over 300 recognized politicians, businessmen, diplomats and celebrities, as well as Sir Paul McCartney himself, joined the charitable fundraising event organized by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation. The amount raised totaled almost 4 million hryvnas – enough to purchase new modern equipment for the Children's Department at the National Cancer Institute, which is the biggest medical institution in our country specializing in fighting children's oncologic diseases. November 16, a new tomography scanner with a computer workstation was installed in the National Cancer Institute in Kyiv.