When Ukrainian social media influencer Anna Tsukur started building her business as a fitness guru a few years ago, she made choices to maximize her appeal: focus on women, shoot in inspiring locations like Bali, and mostly speak Russian.
That was then.
After Russia invaded Ukraine last year, she decided her first job as an influencer should be to influence people about the war, and appeal to her Russian followers to protest their country’s actions.
The result: a flood of insults from Russians who claimed Ukraine was guilty.
Then she decided to ignore her own business model. She changed languages to teach Ukrainian, although she knew she would lose followers not only in Russia, but also in the countries that once made up the Soviet Union and where many people still speak Russian.
“I felt from my heart,” she said, “that it was the right thing to do to show that I support my people, Ukraine.”
Last year’s invasion of Moscow has led to a cultural upheaval in Ukrainian society that parallels the fighting. Monuments to Russian heroes have been knocked down or defaced, and Russian writers, painters, and composers, whom the Soviet education system despised for decades, are suddenly slandered in a process called “de-Russification.”
At the heart of that transformation is language, with more Ukrainians – most of whom understand both languages - switching to Ukrainian. The transition had begun years before, starting with independence, but accelerated last year.
According to Vira Slyvinska, a senior executive at AIR, thousands of influencers who created content from everything from children’s games to beauty tips and from science to comedy, like Ms. Tsukur, switched from Russian to Ukrainian after the large-scale invasion, in many cases from one on the other day. Media-Tech, an international company founded by Ukrainians that supports online content creators.
Some have also shifted focus dramatically, abandoning their original subjects for videos that support the country’s war effort.
But by far the bigger change was the change in language.
In Soviet times, Russian was the language of higher education and professionals in Ukraine, and was spoken by an urban elite. Ukrainian dominated in many rural areas, but with power and wealth concentrated in cities, the appeal of Russian was obvious.
Even after Ukraine became independent in 1991, Russian remained widely spoken.
“It’s like a post-colonial situation where Russian was seen as a hallmark of quality,” said Volodymyr Kulyk, a senior fellow at the Kuras Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, and an expert on language politics. . “Despite being a sophisticated language with literature and education, Ukrainian was seen as less modern and less well equipped for contemporary purposes.”
A prominent example of the linguistic transition is President Volodymyr Zelensky. Before running for president in 2019, he had built a career as a television comedian broadcasting mainly in Russian. But he campaigned for the presidency in Ukrainian.
Language has also been at stake in the war itself. When Moscow seized Ukrainian territory, it urged teachers to use Russian as the language of instruction in lessons. Some of those who joined were accused of collaboration by Ukrainian authorities, who have recaptured much of the territory in recent months.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia cited the need to protect Russian speakers as part of his false justification for the war.
For social media influencers, for whom cachet is so valuable, it made sense before the war to use the language that many saw as a cultural touchstone. Russian also immediately expanded their audience, given how many people in former Soviet republics know it.
Thus, language switching had a significant impact on influencer audience size. That matters, because for many of the most popular stars, ratings are a key to brand deals, and in the case of YouTube, influencers can be paid based on the size of their viewership.
An analysis by AIR Media-Tech of 20 major Ukrainian YouTube accounts found that the total income of those who switched languages fell by an average of 24 percent in 2022 compared to a year earlier.
Between last March and March, total views for those who switched languages also dropped 24 percent, mainly due to a drop in views in Russia and other former Soviet republics, the company said.
Ms. Tsukur, the fitness influencer, said she had lost more than half of her sales since the large-scale invasion began, not only because she had switched languages, but also because some Ukrainian women could not afford the fees for her online courses or courses . were too distracted by the war to concentrate on exercise.
She currently has 149,000 followers on Facebook, over 84,000 followers on Instagram, and over 58,000 subscribers on YouTube.
Still, the war has given many social media personalities new purpose — and in some cases, wider audiences.
Before the invasion, Pavlo Vyshebaba was an environmental activist whose videos on YouTube were sometimes viewed as little as 300 times, according to Ms. Slyvinska.
He has since joined the army and started making videos about his experiences on the front lines. He now has 94,000 YouTube subscribers and 131,000 followers on Instagram.
Oleksandr Pedan, 41, underwent another evolution. He was one of Ukraine’s top television stars and a household name before embarking on a social media career. He said a typical pre-conflict YouTube episode involved him hosting party games like Mafia played with other glamorous influencers.
When the war started, he switched to Ukrainian and began creating content focused on the country’s volunteer efforts. He also visited front-line soldiers to shoot videos, and made one to help students displaced by the conflict find new universities. One of his most successful videos, he said, compared life in the southeastern city of Mariupol before and after its destruction by a Russian siege last spring.
Mr Pedan said his audience numbers and revenue dropped as the full-scale invasion began. But he believed he had to respond to the gravity of the national situation. He currently has 647,000 followers on Instagram.
For Ukrainian comedian Oleksii Durniev, who is also a household name, the war has brought with it a particularly cruel irony. Growing up in Mariupol, he spoke Russian and had a deep admiration for Russian pop culture and hip-hop. So it was only natural that when he started making wacky, irreverent YouTube videos, his preferred language was Russian.
“At the time, we thought Ukraine should be closer to Russia,” he said. “Everyone in our region thought that way.”
In one video, he sits in his kitchen in Kiev with Russian comedian Eldar Dzharakhov, and together they mock Instagram stories of other social media stars. Since the start of the war, 36-year-old Durniev has blocked Russian comics on social media. Earlier this year, he said, he saw a YouTube video of Mr Dzharakhov sharing a stage at a patriotic gathering in Moscow with Mr Putin.
Today, Mr. Durniev only speaks Ukrainian in his videos – he has 1.3 million subscribers on YouTube and just under 1 million followers on Instagram. A typical still contains comedy, but with a war-flavored theme. In one, he compares the food rations consumed by Ukrainian soldiers to the ration packs given to Russian troops.
His conclusion? Moscow’s rations are so bad that Russian soldiers could die from eating them alone.
Like other social media personalities, he said the shift in language and content over the past 14 months was shocking, but ultimately necessary.
“Ukrainians needed a trigger to make us think about who we are and our culture, mission and language,” he said. “But it is a pity that we pay such a high price for it.”
Yuri Shyvala reporting contributed.
