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Posted: 2024-07-11 09:55:34

Yulia is sitting in her barely lit apartment in central Kyiv. There's a power outage across the city – another one. She's resigned to it.

"They come and go, basically three to four times a day," she says.

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One other thing Yulia has gotten used to is air raids and she says many Ukrainians know what type is coming by the sound.

"We have three levels of air raids," Yulia tells 7.30.

"If we see that it's a MiG-31 (a supersonic interceptor aircraft), no one goes to the bomb shelter because it's just a MiG-31 changing airfields.

"Then there is Shahed, so UAVs (more commonly known as drones). Then there is an air raid for cruise missiles and an air raid for ballistics.

"Ballistics is what I go to the bomb shelter for."

At 9:30am on Monday, July 8, Yulia was doing her dishes when she heard an air raid outside her window. She felt confident if was likely a MiG.

"In Ukraine you get used to these sounds," she tells 7.30.

"You know the sound of something hitting. You know what's a sound of a of a missile being intercepted [and] you know what a UAV sounds like.

"Your ears are trained," she says.

Yulia continued going about her day, deciding to take her dog for a walk. She then turned on her phone camera to start a TikTok video in the lobby of her apartment building but was taken aback by a deafening sound.

Rescuers work around a partly collapsed hospital building.

Rescuers work at the Okhmatdyt children's hospital after it was was hit by a Russian missile.(Reuters: Oleksandr Ratushniak)

"I felt the blast," she says.

"I immediately knew that's not air defence working, that's contact. And something was hit," she says.

It was the sound of missiles striking Okhmatdyt, Ukraine's biggest hospital for children with cancer.

That strike was part of a missile bombardment which killed at least 38 people across Ukraine, hypersonic missiles were reported to have hit the hospital.

"We walked towards there. It literally looked like Armageddon," Yulia says.

New York to wartime Kyiv

A woman sits outside a cafe patting a dog.

Yulia was living in New York when the war started.(Instagram: Yewleea)

Life wasn't always like this for 29-year-old Yulia, who doesn't want to use her full name for fear of becoming a target for Russian cyber criminals.

Before the war she lived in New York City, working as a user experience (UX) designer.

Then in February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine in a major escalation of the war, Yulia says she was surrounded by New Yorkers who had lots of "silly" questions. 

A smiling woman with long hair.

Yulia says she felt "very alone" in New York as war raged in Ukraine.(Instagram: Yewleea)

As a Ukranian she says she was expected to provide all the answers, and that sometimes frustrated her.

One day a friend suggested she post her interpretation of events on TikTok. 

Recalling the moment she says she thought it was "the dumbest idea on the planet", because at the time TikTok's reputation was for things like "Charli D'Amelio dancing and shaking her booty". 

So instead Yulia took to Instagram.

"That video got tens of thousands of views, and people had so many questions."

She says that shortly after she relented, and started posting on TikTok too, where her first videos went off, with hundreds of thousands of views and comments.

"I'm a nerd. I've always loved geopolitics and history, and that was one of these things that I knew a lot about. So I started answering these questions.

"I did some 'lives' with my history teacher from high school, and then United 24 reached out to me so I started working with them."

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