Besides a woman's name, Ilya afaik is also the Russian word for a species of flower. But with the little I know of Russian, trying to approach the pronunciation to what I'd expect it to be, it sounds like the female form of Julius, Julia, if I was to pronounce by Norwegian logic, the language not being geographically too far from the Slav ones.

And it wouldn't be the first name I see that changes for some random reason. For example, to my knowledge, the male name Tiago comes from a long line of mispronunciations starting at Jacob/Jacobus.

So going by that, it makes me think, could those two names, Ilya and Julius, be related? Or would their phonetic similarity be a coincidence?