«We realized we were in danger from the second day of war. We collected what we could in a small luggage and forgot the life we used to know. We knew that we would never see our house again».
Mariia is an influencer and a skin positive activist. She has been using social media for years to raise awareness of skin problems such as acne. But everything changed on February 24, 2022. An album of old photographs contains all the memories that Mariia and her mother managed to take away before rushing to Kiev station. «It was crowded. When a siren went off everyone was screaming. It was madness». People pushed desperately to grab a place before the others, getting on the first train was impossible. «We managed to get on only three hours later. I cried because a friend of mine had been left behind. She was the last person to enter».
In the train Mariia loses the sense of time, she does not remember how many hours it took, she only remembers the fear felt when the train stopped in the middle of nowhere. «We knew that the Russian army could attack us. We could not get off, we did not know what to do. We had no escape, we thought we would die there».
After arriving in Lviv, the journey to cross the border into Slovakia begins. Only a few hours of rest before leaving: Prague, then Berlin, finally, Hamburg.
Mariia now lives alone, staying in a hotel in the German city. «I am so tired of this». Everything began to run fast in her life but she wanted to fix a point in this crazy journey: to be a witness. After Putin’s speech in which he denied any right of independence to Ukraine, Mariia decided to share, for the first time, political content on her social profiles. «Over the centuries Russia has too often tried to take away the possibility of being Ukrainian».
Since the outbreak of the war, thousands of users have decided to share their experiences, their travels, their fears on social media, in particular on the Chinese TikTok media. No wonder: the desire to document and show what is happening in the world has evolved along with the development of new technologies. The American Civil War (1861-1865) was the first major conflict to be documented through photography; cinema for World War I in 1914; television for the Vietnam War; the First Gulf War of 1991 followed by 24-hour cable. Twitter witnessed the Arab Spring of 2011; TikTok talks about the Russian invasion of Ukraine today. For this active involvement of young people and their desire to document what is happening in Ukraine, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has also been dubbed “the war of the twenties” or “War Tok“.
«How can one not speak? I have no words for those who remain silent. When the war began I had no doubts about what to do». Since she began documenting the destruction of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Maria admits to having lost about seven hundred followers, many of whom were Russians.
In response, Mariia changed the way she addressed her audience. «I used to shoot a lot of content in Russian. Thank God I studied Ukrainian at school. Now I only use English and Ukrainian». A choice that Mariia also brought into her daily life. «I come from Kharkiv, not far from the border with this mob nearby. Russian was the language I used with my friends and family. I thought it was normal, I thought of Russia as a country with which we shared many aspects of our culture. Now I don’t want anything more that binds me to them and I am trying to speak only Ukrainian».
Mariia used the great popularity of her profile (28,1 thousand followers on Instagram and 64,6 thousand on Tik Tok) to attract the attention of users from all over the world. «I am especially addressing my American followers who do not have such close contact with the conflict. Unfortunately people are getting used to it, even I have lost count of the days of war that have passed. It’s hard to bear mentally but we must not forget that the Ukrainians are still fighting for democracy and for the whole of Europe».
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