How young Ukrainians have turned social media into a lifeline as war unfolds around them

Sasha Korashvili’s 26th birthday was going to be special.

Just three weeks out from the big day, she got confirmation that the rare form of blood cancer she was diagnosed with two years earlier was in remission. She was cancer-free. After gruelling bone-marrow transplants, followed by months spent in her Kyiv apartment de ella, hidden away from a raging pandemic and a virus that would surely be the death knell for her freshly wiped immune system, she was finally in the clear.

Plans to start a master’s degree at the University of Oklahoma could now be set in motion. This birthday, she thought, would not only mark another trip around the sun, but a confidence that there’d be many more.

“I kind of thought I could live like a normal person again,” she said.

In reality, her birthday, March 1, came days after Russia invaded Ukraine. Her city de ella was now a war zone and she was not only forced back indoors, but underground — she spent nearly a week shuffling between her apartment de ella and the parking garage below for shelter.

“I can’t really remember how long I was there for,” she said recently over a WhatsApp call, now safely at her aunt’s home in Vienna. Her birthday de ella, however, stands out — documented and prominently shared on Instagram.

“I was there with my boyfriend and friends and they went and (got) a cake somehow, like a traditional cake,” she says, awe still in her voice.

Sharing this memory with what she describes as “not many followers” ​​was an instinct she didn’t question. She and her boyfriend de ella have recorded all of their experiences since war came to their city.

“I find it very helpful and therapeutic,” she says — social media maintains her connection with both international friends and those who remain inside Ukraine.

She’s not alone. Millions of other young Ukrainians now clock-in on their phones upon waking. First, Korashvili checks in on her parents and friends, then pivots to an endless scroll of local Telegram channels, WhatsApp group chats and Twitter lists where recent reports from inside her besieged city of Kyiv are frequently posted.

This routine would sound fairly standard for anyone her age, but for those living through war it’s tinged with a darker intensity. Many of the young people the Star spoke with, both those who have fled to other cities inside their country or have left Ukraine entirely, now rely on these apps as an essential link to the communities they left.

“Social media in some ways, it can hurt you but it’s also a very great source to find support,” says Korashvili.

That double-edged trait is one that Dr. Petya Eckler is all too familiar with. “This is the beauty — and I guess the curse — of social media,” says Eckler, an academic from the University of Strathclyde Glasgow and an expert in health communication through social media. She notes that, in the context of war, such online platforms can create a comfortable mental space for a person alienated from their physical one.

“War is both traumatic because it’s a risk to your life … But it’s also traumatic because of the social isolation that is imposed on you,” she explained. Families are split up. People are resettled into temporary and unknown spaces. You might not know what you’re doing next week or if you’ll have a private room that night.

“When physical spaces shrink, psychological ones become all the more important.”

Social media’s tools for self-expression and self-validation, Eckler explains, could be viewed as comparable to the kind of writing therapy which people use to heal after a traumatic event.

“It’s a different way of approaching yourself and in your life during these times. And this way, one that’s a bit more introspective and more reflective, can be more constructive,” she said. “Particularly for those just trying to cope.”

That coping can take many forms. A young man, whom the Star met in the basement of a hotel in Lviv while air-raid sirens wailed, showed how he and his wife de él had converted his pudgy beagle Christie’s Instagram account into a platform for sharing updates on the war.

“Before the war, we published happy pictures,” said the 23-year-old who came from Kyiv with his wife’s family, and asked to remain anonymous for personal reasons. Now, their posts “show the world what is happening in our homeland” — and attending to Christie’s account of her and her thousands of followers provides the couple with a distraction from their reality.

Outside on the street in Lviv, a 19-year-old Mikhail — recently escaped from Irpin, only days before Russian tanks rolled past his block — explained how he and his friends rely on WhatsApp to confirm each other’s safety.

“We have a roll call each morning,” he said. “Each one of us is responsible for checking in and if we don’t respond by a certain time, then we have a list of contacts to start reaching out to.”

Dr. Praveen Kambam, a clinical psychiatrist for children and adolescents, adds that social media have actually been shown to increase community, in previous crises such as the pandemic and US school shootings, among young people processing trauma.

“It is often a pathway for communication, connection, and expression for them,” he wrote in an email to the Star.

With families dispersed across borders and time zones, that kind of connection, for most young Ukrainians, is primarily being found online. The Star recently met a group of students and young professionals outside a Lviv coffee shop. The five, ranging in age from 20 to 23, explained how they’d fled Kharkiv, a city that’s witnessed some of the heaviest shelling since the war began, the day after the invasion. Today was the first time they’d ventured outside the four walls of their hotel rooms since arriving.

“The first day here, I was constantly on my phone. And it’s very difficult, all the scrolling,” said Victoria, a 21-year-old public relations student. She’s an administrator for a Kharkiv public Telegram channel and so she spends hours glued to her phone trying to verify videos and reports being posted en masse.

“You have to always double-check information. You cannot just blindly trust everything that’s put up,” she says. Her friend de ella, a 23-year-old student studying at Kharkiv University, leans over and adds that it’s not just news reports they’re following closely.

“There’s many memes about the Ukraine situation that help us to feel safe,” he said. “It helps me not (feel) afraid.”

In fact, a lot of the content being shared on Telegram, Instagram and Twitter can be traced back to none other than Ukraine’s official Twitter account. Its posts about the ongoing conflict often rely on memes — in one of the most popular tweets, the account shared what’s known as the “headache meme,” several drawings of a silhouetted skull depicting the location of various headaches. A migraine, for instance, is shaded red behind the eyes; hypertension at the back of the skull. The final frame shows a “Russia headache” — red everywhere.

The account pokes fun at its surprisingly informal content with a description that reads: “Yes, this is the official Twitter account of Ukraine.”

On Telegram, the tone can be more shadow and graphic. Channels there, both public and private, provide up-to-the-minute updates on what’s happening in besieged cities — but you can also find unverified and violent content: Photos of dead soldiers, videos of confessions by prisoners of war, and the ruins of collapsed buildings.

Eckler said information from Ukraine can illuminate the situation for the viewer, even when shared in the form of memes or Tiktoks. However, she added, the same isn’t true for Russia: “It’s impossible to get accurate information beyond the Putin propaganda.”

Still, Victoria, who speaks Russian, says she dedicates a lot of her time not only verifying local news coming out of Ukraine, but also scrutinizing the invading country’s social media as well.

“Sometimes you have to read the Russian news in order to understand what narratives Russians are putting down,” she explained.