THE CHANGE AGENT PODCAST
The Change Agent Podcast exists for one reason: to keep the world paying attention to Ukraine and to help people find real ways to support it.
Host Eric Adams examines events in Ukraine and monthly, sits down with the people making big differences for Ukraine and its people. Ukrainian soldiers, humanitarians, diplomats, and the founders of organizations that keep families fed, bring deported children home, and put Russian war crimes on the record.
Between those conversations, Eric takes stories out of the news, digs into what happened, and explains why they matter far beyond Ukraine’s borders. Past guests include Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk, Mariam Lambert of the Emile Foundation, Olga Rudneva of Superhumans Center, and Artem Mazur of Kids of Ukraine.
Why does this matter to you? Attention fades, and the Kremlin is counting on it. How this war ends will decide whether borders in Europe can be redrawn by force and whether the West’s promises mean anything at all. Ukrainians pay for that answer every day. Staying informed and showing up for them is the least the rest of us can do.
How you can help:
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Victoria John spent more than 30 years in NHS and British military medicine before she began bringing rehabilitation to wounded Ukrainian soldiers. In this interview on The Change Agent Podcast, she explains why Ukraine’s physical therapy gap is so wide and what one clinician can do about it.
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Her first drive across the Polish border came with no GPS and a car full of aid she hadn’t had time to check. On day one at a Ukrainian rehab center, she met a soldier being treated only for his amputation. He also had a severe traumatic brain injury and half a missing foot that nobody had caught. That’s when she realized her years at the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre mattered more than she’d thought. Victoria talks about what military medicine taught her, including blunt advice from British triple amputee Mark Ormrod: don’t go easy on them. She puts the number of Ukrainians waiting for rehabilitation above 300,000. She explains why she puts eastern units facing redeployment first, and how her train the trainer model lets veterans treat each other between her visits.
Then Eric asks about a photo of Victoria watching Alexander, a double amputee who lay in a field for 12 hours with three tourniquets on. He’d told her he wanted to walk without prosthetics. The photo shows his first steps. She closes with what rehabilitation for Ukraine’s veterans has to look like once the war ends, and why purpose may be the strongest medicine they get.
00:00 Introduction and first trip into Ukraine
05:45 Lessons from British military medicine
12:40 Why eastern units come first
19:40 Train the trainer in Dnipro
25:40 What frontline medics need most
31:10 Veterans, purpose, and the rebuild
36:20 Alexander’s first steps
Victoria John LinkedIn: [URL]
Our Stuff
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17 Aug 2026
Ukraine's Cultural Infrastructure - Dr. Viktor Ruban
Dr. Viktor Ruban, a Ukrainian choreographer and dance movement therapist, joins The Change Agent Podcast to talk about Ukrainian cultural resilience and why he treats performing arts as infrastructure, not decoration, in a country at war.
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Ruban started as a dancer and choreographer, performing across Ukraine and Europe long before any institution backed him. That changed after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, when he and other artists blocked Ukraine's Ministry of Culture to stop corruption evidence from being destroyed, which grew into the Ukrainian Culture Foundation and the Ukrainian Institute. From there he built the Impulse Transformation Platform and Kyiv Dance Residency, the country's first research space for movement based art. He traces Russia's decades long campaign to claim Ukrainian artists and erase Ukrainian identity, arguing Ukrainian cultural resilience is a defense question as much as an artistic one.
The conversation turns to the Ukrainian Emergency Performing Arts Fund, launched within weeks of the 2022 invasion. Ruban describes fielding roughly 1,600 requests for help and funding just over 500 artists through 120 solidarity events in 23 countries, including a 70 year old teacher in Zaporizhzhia doing performative readings with kids near the front line. He then explains his recovery work grounded in Bessel van der Kolk's idea that the body keeps the score, the somatic self-regulation techniques he teaches soldiers under fire, and Tanzplan Ukraine, his project with Germany's Bureau Ritter mapping the country's dance infrastructure for the first time.
00:00 Introduction
06:53 Building the Impulse Transformation Platform
14:28 Freedom as practice, not status
20:42 Why culture funding gets cut first
25:57 Inside the Emergency Performing Arts Fund
33:03 The body keeps the score
40:00 Separating art, therapy, and clinical care
45:29 Building Tanzplan Ukraine
Viktor Ruban LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/viktor-ruban-58260012/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/viktor-ruban-58260012/)
Viktor Ruban Website: http://www.viktorruban.com (http://www.viktorruban.com)
Viktor Ruban Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RubanProduction.ITP/ (https://www.facebook.com/RubanProduction.ITP/)
ICF ITP Website: https://icfitp.org.ua/ (https://icfitp.org.ua/)
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Our website: https://www.thechangeagent.studio (https://www.thechangeagent.studio)
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Music licensed via Soundstripe
Song: Revolting Machines
Artist: Lunareh
ContentID: RUZO0A8KYKQDUJIG
12 Aug 2026
The Courage To Rebuild - Beginning Again After War in Ukraine - Tonya Bulgakova
Tonya Bulgakova joins The Change Agent Podcast to talk about Ukrainian refugee leadership, tracing her path from a small city in central Ukraine to leading an NGO team in Brussels made up entirely of expats. She fled the war with two kids, picked up English on the job, and built a management role from nothing.
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Tonya grew up in a small city in central Ukraine and left home at 15. She worked her way through a call center job, then five years with the Ukrainian prime minister's office, before starting her own business, which she ran until the war forced her to leave the country. She fled to Belgium with her two kids and had to rebuild almost everything at once, starting with a language she barely spoke. She landed at an international NGO that supports youth career readiness, on a team where every single colleague, including her, was an expat. Three national languages in one country, and none of them her native Ukrainian. Leading as a Ukrainian refugee in that setting meant learning to read people first and translate second, a skill she says took years to build.
The turning point wasn't a promotion. It came from watching how differently Ukrainians and their Spanish and Brazilian colleagues handle a simple email reply, and realizing her own directness had a reason behind it. That kind of self awareness, paired with a habit of asking for more responsibility instead of waiting for it, is what eventually earned her a management role that didn't exist before her in the organization. She talks candidly about what she had to give up to get there, and what she's only now getting back.
00:00 Introduction
05:06 Finding a role model in her sister
10:29 Culture shock inside an all expat team
16:11 Asking her way into a management role
21:16 Trading a business for team responsibility
26:50 Freedom to reshape her team culture
33:35 Advice for leading across languages
Tonya Bulgakova LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonya-bulgakova/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonya-bulgakova/)
Our Stuff
Our website: https://www.thechangeagent.studio (https://www.thechangeagent.studio)
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Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-change-agent-podcast/id1794550342 (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-change-agent-podcast/id1794550342)
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4LoAakYrrg60ld766wKqto?si=OjaQfNF9RbiRH1GCzxOtsw (https://open.spotify.com/show/4LoAakYrrg60ld766wKqto?si=OjaQfNF9RbiRH1GCzxOtsw)
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Music licensed via Soundstripe
Song: Moonlight
Artist: Lone Canyon
ContentID: F33GBKJZZLVTLXFN
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