 Welcome to the first episode of our War Departments series of alumni interviews. I'm Shiza, I'm a third year history and international relations student. Today I'm interviewing Yulia Chukova, who completed her MA in conflict security and development in the war studies department in 2020 to 2021. Yulia is now a weapon contamination coordinator for the International Committee of the Red Cross Syria Program based in Geneva. Yulia's passion about doing her parts mitigate against the consequences of explosive violence. Being Ukrainian and working in this field is incredibly timely, considering the geopolitical atmosphere present. So thank you so much for coming to talk to us today. And Yulia, may I start by just making sure that all, and asking about all your friends and family and colleagues are all right at the minute. Yeah, it's fine, everyone is alive. I just wanted to update maybe from your latest information. I used to be based in Syria with ICRC, that's true. But for the last two weeks, I ended my mission there and then I'm already in Europe and on my way basically to Ukraine. Can you tell us about your career journey and how you got to the point that you're at now? Yeah, I think it's similar for many people from the conflict affected countries, I think, because like until 2014, I used to be a children coach and I was working in local NGO and never planned to leave my hometown. But I'm from Eastern Ukraine, so the war in 2014 didn't get there. But after Russian invasion, I was starting to volunteer. I was volunteering in the hospital with injured soldiers, with injured civilians. I was volunteering, collected a lot of aid and equipment for military units at that point. We did a lot of fundraising and kind of community engagement activities, I would say. Now, as I know how to call it, I didn't know it back then. Yeah, and in 2016, I joined International NGO, Danish Demanding Group, and I went to the very Eastern Ukraine to conduct explosive ordinance risk education sessions for communities there, civilians in the frontline, how to behave safer in the presence of explosive ordinance, which were highly present there and they are highly present now as well as well. So yeah, and then my career developed from there. I used to be a trainer, so then I started to lead the project and then I had a brief experience with the United Nations Development Program in Kiev, working on corruption prevention initiatives. But basically, it was still very much around the training and the behavior change. And yeah, and then I went to Afghanistan with my old organization, the Danish Demanding Group, and I was leading the explosive ordinance risk education projects there, which was the biggest at that point. And of course, this international experience changed a lot my perspective on things and kind of advanced my career in the field, if I can say so. And then I went to Iraq with United Nations Mind Action Service, also still working on explosive ordinance risk education. And then I got the Xi Jinping Scholarship. I took a kind of career gap and it's supposed to be a fun year of studies at Kings. I think the idea of having a gap year doing masters was not the smartest because it was pretty heavy and it was a very online year because it was a pandemic year. I didn't have any single in-person class, but I was very lucky because I had the fantastic classmates really. And we bonded a lot and we tried to study together and did activities together as much as pandemic allowed us. And yeah, and after that, I went to Syria as a weapon condemnation coordinator to lead their program with ICRC. And of course, after the escalation of war in February, I decided that my country needs me kind of much more than Syria at that stage. So I ended my mission in the beginning of April and I'm now managing a couple of volunteering projects while I can and then joining the mining charity in Ukraine soon in less than a month from now. So yeah, that's where I am now. That's very cool. Thank you. So yeah, following up on one of those, in a previous interview that you did with Kings College, you stated that the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine in 2014 had a profound impact on you. And I wanted to ask specifically, how did these influence the direction that you took your career? Yeah, I mean, I completely, it's changed my life completely because in 2014, so I'm from Dnipro, it's the Eastern Central Ukraine, if you can say. So from the old front line, it was around 200 kilometers to my hometown. And of course, after invasion in 2014, we were living in the constant fear of Russian advance to our cities. And I remember just having a grab bag all the time and the majority of my friends and some classmates during the army. And we started to do something to help. And when the Ilovaisk tragedy, I would say happened when the green corridors were shelled and they were like massive number of casualties at this stage. And the Ukrainian, like even Dnipro hospitals, even civilian hospitals were flooded by injured people. So I volunteered to help. And I think the whole system of my values changed dramatically because everything else I did before stopped being important. And yeah, I'm very happy. I was one of the very few very likely people who managed to make the passion and the urge for help a career. And I think this is honestly the only motivation that you have to have while joining humanitarian field because that's definitely not the case for everyone. So yeah, it's changed my life. I like, I'm apart from war and apart from conflict right now and apart from escalation, I'm content with my career and I'm content with my expertise and capacity to help. So I think, yeah, I think it was indeed a profound impact. Yeah. So even at the round the time that we were planning this interview, a lot changed. And I was wondering how do you think the invasion of by Russia into Ukraine, even just this year is going to continue to shape your path? And yeah, I mean, it's early on, I guess, but do you think this will have as profound an impact on your career as it did in 2014? I mean, I'm not a fortune teller. I can't say for sure. And I'm not a political analyst either. It already did because I left Syria and I felt that I can't do otherwise. And I'm very happy that ICRC supported me in this move. I think it will because my international career, which was like in the recent years, like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, is definitely gonna focus on Ukraine for the foreseeable future because, I mean, first of all, the expertise is pretty unique considering the Ukrainian background and knowledge of context and everything. But also like I think that's somewhere where I would be needed the most for a long while. And my field is like explosive, it's humanitarian, my action basically or explosive ordinance risk education. It is something that is continuing to be needed long after the hot face of invasion is over. And it's not over yet. And we don't know when it's gonna be over. So, and like the country is already like dramatically contaminated by explosive ordinance, which basically means that we will have to have a joint effort to clean the country from them for foreseeable years at minimum. So unfortunately it's definitely a life-changing another turn, not the first one, but the big one. Yeah, yeah. Could you tell us a bit more about how your role was as a weapons contamination coordinator? It's not something that I was personally familiar with beforehand, but it sounds really interesting. So, I mean, the career in the humanitarian mine action is in principle very, I can't say similar, but it covers more or less the same basics. So weapon contamination coordination is the one who is managing the program of the ICRC specifically, but basically any humanitarian mine action coordinator doing more or less the same. So, again, when the war ends and even if the war doesn't end, the unexploded ordinance and the remnants of war from the conflict are abandoned and they all cause death to civilians. And they all, of course, impede the economic development. Like farmers cannot work on their farm because of explosive remnants of war. In Syria, it's pretty critical situation because people can't live in the places which are massively contaminated, massively destroyed, but also massively contaminated. And the reconstruction cannot start and the rebuilding of the destroyed houses cannot start without making sure that the area is clear from explosive remnants of war. So, this is big part of humanitarian mine action is, of course, clearance. As ICRC, we didn't have clearance in the country, but apart from clearance, there are another four pillars, so called of mine action, which are explosive ordinance risk education, mine victim assistance, stockpile destruction and advocacy. So, we were engaged in, I would say, two and a half of them, basically, in explosive ordinance risk education massively. So, the main target of explosive ordinance risk education is to educate people about the risks of explosive hazards to offer them the safest possible behavior in the weapon-contaminated settings. And mine victim assistance, of course, it's pretty self-explanatory when people are suffering, when people are becoming a victim from of the explosive ordinance, often it is, it causes a disability. And of course, these people should be assisted not only in terms of prosthetic limbs and physical rehabilitation, but also psychological rehabilitation, economic support and so on and so forth. So, this is something big that was also doing. Like in practice in Syria, I had local Syrian colleagues who were doing fantastic job in different provinces of Syria. And the big and really, really large team of Syrian Arab Red Crescent volunteers who were doing this risk education activities for the population. So, in practice, I think humanitarian connection is not, that's, okay, that's dear to my heart, but it's not that different from any other humanitarian programs. It's a lot of program management, it's a lot of coordination. It's a lot of technical knowledge on social and behavioral change communication when you develop materials, when you develop approaches. It's a lot about monitoring and evaluation to make sure that your activities are actually making any difference on the ground, which is still very important part of the humanitarian response. Wow, yeah, that's a lot. Thank you. I wanted to ask a couple of questions about your time at King's and your experience with the degree that you did with King's College under. So, why did you choose to come and study an MA in complex security and development at King's and especially during the pandemic? And yeah, how did you find that? Well, I didn't know that it's gonna be a pandemic here. Yeah, when you're at the fire. I thought a lot actually, would I have like done differently if I had known that it's gonna be a pandemic here? And on the one hand, yes, I like, I wouldn't lie, having online classes only, it's definitely not the full experience that you can have as a student. So it kind of deprives you massively from networking and deprives you massively from interactions with professors and your peer students. But at the same time, I was thinking that, because I really gave it a lot of thought and I was thinking like, okay, if I hadn't done it last year, I wouldn't have met my classmates and I think we formed a fantastic group and a fantastic bond. And many of them are now in South Sudan, in Iraq, I went to Syria, I came back to Ukraine. So I'm pretty sure I will see them all over and over in the field. So I think I'm very happy that I went in that year because I formed this connection and on a both professional but mainly personal level. And I think that's very important. At King's, why conflict security and development? Because I think it was very obvious choice for me after humanitarian career for a while. And as a kind of mature MA student, I consulted, I heard about the program, couple of my colleagues in Iraq actually did it like years before. So it was definitely recommended and I found it very useful. I found the structure very helpful for me personally because I had a lot of practical background but I never managed to systematize that academically. So I know that majority of people do MA and then go to work. That was not the case for me, but also that was not the case for many other my classmates actually because we had, I don't know, we had a pretty experienced group at least half of our group were had one, in one way or another had the international or national humanitarian experience or security experience or army experience. So I think the big part of the learning journey was sharing this experience and sharing outputs and what I loved a lot about the program specifically, I'm not sure whether it's the same for King's in general because, you know, I never met many people out of my program at King's, but I think what benefited us a lot it's the level of internationality of the program. So we had people from Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, India, Ukraine, America, we had a lot of people from all over the Europe. So, and I think this is something that gives you, that basically is the big part of learning because like, there are different perspectives on things and when you discuss specific conflicts, it's very valuable to have insight from someone from the conflict, from someone involved, whose country is involved in the conflict, from someone who is involved as a soldier or someone who is involved as a humanitarian practitioner, which is practically opposite of the soldier. So it was very enriching. Could it be done better, of course, because online year is online year and there were a lot of problems related to that, but at the same time, I think the program itself is something that I really enjoyed and I enjoyed that the selection of optional modules was like very interesting for me and I was very lucky to get basically all that they wanted modules and it was very interesting to discover for myself like another part, like security and counterterrorism studies which I never knew anything about and now I think that's very important and very valuable knowledge for my future career. That's really interesting to hear, especially having classmates that are like on either front of a conflict from different countries. I think it's incredibly valuable to have people who are actually somewhat personally involved in them and it's also very encouraging to hear about how close you became with your classmates despite being online and the connections that you made. Thank you so much for coming to speak to us about this. I was incredibly insightful and knowledgeable and I'm so glad that I could be the one to interview today. So yeah, thank you so much. It's a big pleasure to be interviewed by you and good luck on your third year of third. Thank you, yeah, I'm nearly done.