Centering Ukrainian voices and documenting war in her backyard

When Julia Tymoshenko graduated from NYU Abu Dhabi in 2021, she looked forward to beginning her post-college life back in Ukraine. Now, after less than a year of living in Kyiv, the Russian invasion has forced Tymoshenko and millions of others to flee in search of refuge. By sharing her departure and experience on social media, she has gained thousands of followers while continuing to document the tragedy.

“When we all woke up on Feb. 24, around 5 a.m., I think everybody realized that this was actually happening,” Tymoshenko said. “I woke up and heard the explosions and realized that this was it … I escaped from [the capital] on [the] train, together with my mom and some friends. And right now we’re renting an apartment in Lviv.”

While many fled the country, Tymoshenko stayed within Ukrainian borders, opting to move to the western city of Lviv. She explained that leaving the country altogether was not a decision she was willing to make.

“Fleeing my city already felt like a betrayal,” she wrote via Instagram direct message. “I can’t imagine what it would be [like] to leave my country. As a person who loves to travel and explore, I realized that I only love to do it when it’s my choice, not when occupants are coming and forcing me to get out.”

In Tymoshenko’s March 8 Instagram post, red flames engulfed the sky-blue St. George chapel near where Tymoshenko’s grandparents live, as the church joined a growing list of historic buildings destroyed by the war. Growing up in Zavorychi, a village east of Kyiv, Tymoshenko remembers seeing the chapel every day from her grandparents’ yard. She reminisced on the chapel’s beautiful fairy-light decorations during the Christmas season. An old photo of Tymoshenko standing in front of the chapel, which was burned to ashes by Russian shelling, is now just a memory.

“I spent a lot of time growing up just playing in front of [the chapel] and actually being friends with the priest’s son and priest’s kids,” Tymoshenko said. “[My grandma] always said that she lives in a holy place just because she’s right by the church. And I sort of always laughed at that, like I didn’t take it seriously. I knew that she was there to see it burn completely to ashes, and I just don’t know how she felt. She probably felt absolutely terrible, because it has been an even bigger symbol and of a bigger significance to her.”

During the attack that destroyed the chapel, Tymoshenko’s grandfather was shot at but survived. The war had reached home for her. “Everything that is left alive in me burns,” she wrote in the Instagram post caption.

Watching the looming threat of war in Ukraine earlier this year, Tymoshenko’s NYU Abu Dhabi classmates came to her seeking resources about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. At the time, Tymoshenko said she could not find reliable public resources to point them toward. She said the dearth of Ukrainian voices in Western media, combined with sparse shareable resources, prompted her to upload a carousel post to Instagram on the political situation in January.

“It sort of picked up among both foreigners and Ukrainians,” Tymoshenko said. “And that’s when I started getting a lot of of Instagram followers from abroad. The number of followers increased dramatically — I think like in two days I got 10k more. And so many people were texting me.”

While Tymoshenko enjoys using social media as a platform to spread information on issues like LGBTQ+ rights and feminism in Ukraine, her current focus is updating her audience on the day-to-day realities of the Russian invasion and sharing memories of Ukrainian life before the war.

“I was just living a normal life as one does. I was going to work [in] this beautiful co-working space,” she wrote via Instagram DM. “I rented an apartment with another NYUAD alumna. The life was so wholesome. I was looking forward for a concert in March actually.”

Tymoshenko believes the battle for Ukrainians isn’t just on the ground in Ukraine. Even while at NYU, an institution that prides itself for being a global university, she felt misrepresented and experienced erasure of her Eastern European culture.

“Once in NYU Abu Dhabi, we’ve had the case when our dining hall was actually trying to do the cuisines of the world,” she said. “They ran into a problem that if you have such an international campus, you have to be really careful how you label those [dishes].”

She expressed frustration that on a Russian food day at NYU Abu Dhabi’s dining hall, Eastern European foods such as borsch, a dish that originated in Ukraine, were labeled as Russian.

“We were saying this perpetuates the idea of Russian cultural dominance over Eastern Europe, even in such small things as food,” Tymoshenko said. “It’s a small instance that shows again how, in all of these institutions, I think Russia has been given more credibility and chance to represent the region, while other countries and cultures have been grossly overlooked.”

Tymoshenko also critiqued the Russian and Slavic Studies program at NYU’s New York campus, where she studied away during the spring 2021 semester. She said the program spotlights Russian history at the expense of other Eastern European countries, a sentiment she held before the war started.

“It was really interesting for me, as a Ukrainian student abroad in this big institution, to observe how my part of the world is being studied from the perspective of the U.S. academics and academic institutions,” she said. “And it’s in my opinion, my perspective, it’s still being studied through the colonial lens of Russia.”

She believes that Ukrainian culture today is battling contemporary colonialism while the country fights against Russia for its sovereignty.

“I think highlighting Russia as the dominant voice of all Slavic nations, or the country … that has determined the course of Eastern Europe is kind of problematic,” Tymoshenko said. “It excludes the voices and the cultures and the beautiful diversity of all the nations that are in Eastern Europe that have to survive and fight against Russia in order to become independent today or in order to preserve their languages and culture.”

By using Instagram as a platform for raising awareness of the Russian invasion and sharing resources for foreigners, Tymoshenko hopes to make a change to dominant archetypes of Ukrainian identity and combat misrepresentations of Ukraine.

“I really don’t like the narrative that has been spread in the Western media about us for a very long time that we’re this sort of second-world European country,” Tymoshenko said. “But by me sharing these videos and pictures, again, I want to focus on getting across the message of, this is how people lived here before, which is probably not very much different from the life in Europe, the life in the United States.”

Tymoshenko thinks that the recent online attention — and her Instagram verification — haven’t changed her social media style. While she believes her blue check mark helps her reach people faster, she does not want to be perceived as someone special because of it.

“I’ve always been very, I guess, vocal about a lot of political issues on my personal Instagram,” Tymoshenko said. “I’ve kept my Instagram as a little blog from all of my traveling and studies at NYU Abu Dhabi. And it was mostly me talking about this experience as a Ukrainian abroad, and I’ve mostly had a Ukrainian audience.”

She offers a solution for foreigners who want to assist Ukraine in the war with Russia. Tymoshenko says not to donate to large bureaucratic organizations; instead, she recommends donating to local organizations on the ground in Ukraine.

In the midst of war, Tymoshenko is still settling into her new apartment, spending most of her time spreading information on Instagram and Twitter and speaking with international media organizations. She admits that she doesn’t get much work done during wartime — just before our interview, an air raid siren went off, she said.

It is with bravery and a love for her culture that Tymoshenko continues to speak with a proudly Ukrainian voice by documenting her experiences with the war in her country. Her story is one of many that illuminate the direction of Ukraine’s future.

“The devil works hard but Ukranians work harder,” she said in a recent Instagram post.