As Russia’s war drags on, young Ukrainians turn to social media to document daily life and reclaim control of their own narratives.
I open my Instagram app and there’s the never ending film strip of short videos. I pause at one showing a fair-haired girl who looks about my age, in her early 20s. “You’re watching Life lately. Welcome to the honest, sometimes messy, but always real weekly recap of my life in Kyiv,” she addresses me along with thousands of others who watch her videos.
What could be regular lifestyle content turns into a political statement through that simple sentence – as life in Kyiv cannot be like any other influencer’s since the full-scale Russian invasion in Ukraine launched in February 2022.
The girl whose video I’m watching is Sophia Telehina, a 24-year-old digital storyteller who grew up in Zaporizhzhia, in the southeastern part of Ukraine. She is one of many young Ukrainians who started using their social media platforms to document how their lives have changed in a war-struck country.
As a member of “Gen Z,” Telehina has been using social media for years, initially for personal use, like many teenagers. “I’ve been doing content for my Instagram since I was 13 – I was born with a phone in my hands,” Telehina says. But with the war continuing, the focus of her posts has shifted. “I started doing this because I felt like I needed to express my feelings. I lost a lot of friends. I lost my home.”
This transformation is not unique to Telehina. Sara Marino is a digital migration scholar from the London College of Communication who has studied and written about content produced by young Ukrainians on TikTok. Many of these content creators were already active on social media before the invasion: “They were using the platforms like any other young person would do.” But as their life changed, so did the content they shared.
In response, some journalists began calling Russia’s war in Ukraine “the first TikTok war” as platforms – TikTok especially – became flooded with rapidly spreading content documenting or discussing the invasion.
However, more than three and a half years later, it has proven to be difficult to maintain the same momentum. “I think as the media tension decreases and the conflict continues to unfold, many creators have come back to their previous uses of the platform,” Marino says. “Their content still speaks about the conflict but there is also a sense of going back to normal routines as much as possible.”
“I Am The War Zone”
In this regard, Telehina is one of the exceptions. A year ago, she started making more content in English. Her last push to do so came when she traveled abroad and encountered biases and stereotypes about Ukrainian people. “I realized it’s not enough. I was making content in Ukrainian because I knew it and used it every day, but I needed to step forward and create more in English – to reach this audience and show them that we are the same people,” she says.
Telehina describes the seemingly incompatible – war becoming part of everyday life. “With my friends, we sing karaoke but we also discuss how our friends are dying. It’s a weird reality,” she says. “And it took me a long time to understand that this reality isn’t normal for everyone.”
In one of her most viewed videos, Telehina explains why she has decided to stay in Ukraine. “You can’t escape the war. War isn’t just happening to me. I carry it around as if it’s a part of my body,” she narrates, while the video shows short snippets from her daily life. Her voice is slow and contemplative as if she were reading from a diary, sharing intimate thoughts with her audience. A soft, melancholic instrumental track plays in the background, reinforcing the contemplative tone of Telehina’s words. “And when random people ask me why I don’t just move somewhere peaceful, they don’t get it. I am the war zone. […] Everyone around me gets it because we’re all carrying the same weight,” she concludes.
Reflecting on the video, Telehina admits she was hesitant to put it online. “When I said the phrase ‘I am the war zone,’ I was very embarrassed to post the video – ’cause, you are not the war zone actually. The people who fight and die in trenches, they are the war zone. They are in the war zone,” she says, reflecting on a video she posted a couple months ago. “But I needed to say it like this because I just didn’t have any other words to express how I felt.”
Telehina calls her content “video essays” – a format she uses to capture her thoughts and emotions. Not all creators take this storytelling approach. Marino has observed a diverse mix of styles on the platform: “We saw politicized content being spread with videos like ‘the point of view,’ ‘get ready with me,’ or ‘a day in the life.’ ” As she says, the creators were able to skillfully play with the platform infrastructure – understanding which formats are popular, attaching hashtags to their posts, and in doing so raising awareness about the war.
Shortening the Emotional Distance
Valeria Shashenok’s TikTok account has 1.2 million followers. Hailing from Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine, she gained attention by highlighting everyday struggles, such as showing the audience her “typical” day in a bomb shelter or the city’s physical destruction.
Unlike Telehina, she does not rely on narrative storytelling; she talks in her videos sporadically and does not put personal vulnerability at the forefront. Her online persona is rather satirical, using dark humor to depict the struggles in Ukraine. Her posts range from light-hearted and easily digestible to more serious ones. In one, she repurposed a trending format to humorously criticize Donald Trump, while in another post she showed the return of Ukrainian captives.
“Mixing and matching styles, languages, humor, and non-humor – it’s a part of how you use the platform, how you adopt it and adapt to it,” Marino says. Shashenok and others have been able to use the language typical of the platform, but also native to them as social media users themselves. As Marino tells it, through the use of familiar language and formats, content creators are able to create a bond with their viewers and lessen the emotional gap between them.
Among those who follow Shashenok’s content is Anastasiia, a Ukrainian student who moved out of the country to pursue education abroad before the full-scale invasion. She started following Shashenok as a way to stay informed and to see the consequences of the war.
“She was filming everything she saw, and I was sharing it on my Instagram Stories [posts that vanish after 24 hours] – so my friends could see it and maybe they would understand,” Anastasiia says. By then, she had already made many international friends and wanted them to grasp the conflict unfolding in her homeland. She also praises the clarity and accessibility of Valeria’s videos, which make them easy to share across her social circles.
“I think it’s mission number one when you’re abroad, to spread awareness and educate people,” Anastasiia explains. Though not a content creator, she has also used her social media account to raise funds on several occasions – for example, for her uncle or a former classmate who were fighting in the war.
Who Still Cares?
But some social media–savvy young Ukrainians do express a sense of desperation. When Telehina talks about her audience engagement, she expresses a wish for stronger international support. Despite her efforts on social media, she sometimes feels that no matter how much she shares, the public attention on Ukraine’s struggles falls short. Observing the current wave of solidarity for Palestine, she says: “I dream of having the same for Ukraine. It’s really hard to prove that we also need your help. We are also worth your attention.”
Asked whether there are any topics too difficult to unpack in a video, Telehina says it’s not about her own limits. “If it’s too much for me, I can’t even formulate it for myself,” she says. “But sometimes I think more of – will it be too much for you guys, foreigners?”
She notes that her global audience tends to be reserved in their responses. The comments she receives are often “stiff and modest,” saying things like “this is so beautiful” or “thank you for this.” But she wishes they would spark a more meaningful conversation. “I feel like there is this wall between people who struggle and who don’t. There is a guilt of those not struggling,” she says. “They can’t express their feelings or how they reflect things because of the guilt.”
Still, even when the audience shows support – through likes, shares, or donations – how strong are these “digital care networks,” as Marino calls them?
“I don’t think they are long-lasting. I think these bonds can be as ephemeral as the platforms. But that also means they can be reactivated just as easily, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Marino says.
Social Media as Resistance
For many young Ukrainians, social media has become a space to reclaim agency – to show what it means to experience war, something they have never lived through before. “Many content creators use the platform to subvert, resist, mock, and criticize existing news stories about the conflict,” Marino says.
As a researcher, she feels a responsibility to approach creators like Telehina or Shashenok with care. “There is a lot of interest around identifying them as refugee or war influencers – we tend to attach labels to their skins and personalities, and there’s not much work done asking them how they feel,” she says.
Telehina, for her part, sees herself as a storyteller. “I tell my own story or the story of my country through my personal lens,” she says. By sharing her own experiences, she says she can represent herself without speaking on behalf of others or giving power away.
The formats and personal approach used by content creators have also influenced the work of young journalists. One example is Andriana Velianyk, a 22-year-old based in Kyiv, who works for Gen Zette, a media startup tailored to young audiences.
“I try to show a personal perspective. It’s not very ‘journalistic,’ but given the format of our media outlet, it works better,” Velianyk says. In one of her videos, she shows her daily routine after a sleepless night during a Russian attack on the capital. She invites viewers into her apartment, starting with a shot of her bathroom, where she had to sleep for safety. She speaks in a calm voice as she applies her makeup, works from home, and goes out for a walk in the neighborhood. The tone of the video shifts at the end as she zooms out of her personal experience and shares the death toll and footage of that night’s destruction.
“I want to show that war is deeply embedded in everyday life. Life seems to be normal here – people pretend it is – but the war is very close, breathing down our necks every night,” Velianyk says.
For her part, Telehina wants to shift her focus toward more educational content about Ukrainian culture. “I’m trying to stay away from this narrative where I hate Russia all the time, and I don’t propose anything instead of that,” she says, adding that she would like to introduce Ukrainian writers to her audience.
Velianyk, who continues to produce content for Gen Zette, also has a wish for her work: “One of my biggest dreams remains to record a video from Kyiv on a day when the war ends.”
Adela Cerna is an editorial intern at Transitions. She is pursuing a master’s degree in journalism, media, and globalization at City St George’s, University of London.
