Yulia Marushevska is a Ukrainian graduate student in literature and history whose short video, entitled “I Am a Ukrainian,” went viral after being posted in February 2014. In the spring of 2014 she gave talks about the cause of Ukrainian freedom in the U.S. and Canada and was interviewed by news media from dozens of countries.

Marushevska is a native of Kiev. “I grew up as an ordinary, Western child,” she told the Stanford Daily in an April 2014 interview. She is a Ph.D. candidate in literature and history at Taras Shevchenko University in Kiev.

She stated in a post-video interview “I study Ukrainian literature but I cannot think about my Ph.D. paper. It’s very important now to change the system because my degree would be useless in a corrupt society. If you want to understand something about Ukrainian protest spirit, try to find Taras Shevchenko in English.”

Marushevska was not politically active prior to the protests, “but when the government stopped an agreement with the EU I was very frustrated.” Before making the video, Marushevska was active in the protests, taking to the streets “from the very beginning of the protests.” She worked as a volunteer on a phone hotline and worked as a guard in a hospital from which injured protesters had been kidnapped by police and put in prison.  Her mother, also a fervent supporter of the EuroMaidan Revolution, “volunteered day and night to help feed demonstrators and slept on the barricades. Marushevska was a student teacher and took her students to the Maidan during the protests “to study Ukraine there, not in the classroom.

The video was produced by American filmmaker Ben Moses, producer of the movie Good Morning Vietnam, and shot by British cinematographer Graham Mitchell. Marushevska met Moses when she was working for him as a translator for his documentary on Andrei Shevchenko. At the time she made the video, she was 24 years old.