Letter ukraine mykhailo tim cook apple2/11/2024 ![]() ![]() “What they are doing is not just PR campaigns, they're also accomplishing real things that benefit the Ukrainian resistance and support Ukrainian citizens,” says Lokot, the Dublin City professor. After nearly two decades of Facebook and a pandemic that forced more of life online, it's no huge leap for a country to turn to apps, crowdsourcing, and social media growth hacking as part of its defense strategy-much like it feels reasonable that government services should move online. The ministry’s wartime projects can seem both surprising and sensible. Other missions have included reporting pro-Russian social media accounts that are spreading false information about the war. More than 300,000 people have now volunteered their skills and joined an official Telegram channel where the IP addresses of Russian companies and websites to target with DDoS attacks are shared daily. Two days after Russia’s assault began, Fedorov posted a call for developers, designers, marketers, and security specialists to join a volunteer “IT Army” coordinated via an official Telegram channel. “It's people that will speak our common language.” “Some of the guys working there are my former employees, a few of them were partners for different projects,” says Sergii Vasylchuk, the founder of blockchain company Everstake, which helped the ministry set up a platform to receive donations in nine different cryptocurrencies. Most ministerial staffers came from that tech background and still had strong ties with the Ukrainian technology scene, which they were able to leverage. The ministry has also channeled energy and ideas from Ukraine’s tech sector, which grew 20 percent in 2020 and is powered by a tradition of technical education and a recent boom in outsourcing from more expensive countries. It now includes a way to quickly donate money to Ukraine’s military, a chatbot for submitting images and video of Russian troop movements, access to 24-hour TV coverage of the crisis, and a kids video channel to help families spending hours stuck sheltering from air strikes. Others at the ministry have repurposed its flagship app Diia. “Fedorov said that we had to do everything to have digital companies leave Russia.” In a video published in early March, Fedorov, wearing a T-shirt and speaking in Russian in front of a crate of Starlink receivers, urged young Russian technology workers to rise up against Putin or “become pariahs.” The constant stream of call-outs to pressure companies, from payment services to game studios, to sever all ties with Russia has been labeled the geopolitical equivalent of canceling. Within a week, Apple halted device sales in Russia, Meta blocked Russian state media accounts for Facebook users in the EU, and Twitter added warnings to all tweets linking to Russian state media. “Fedorov and the Ukrainian strategy provided the tip of the spear, consolidating all of this pressure,” he says. ![]() That campaign made smart use of the momentum created by sanctions levied by the US and other governments, and Russia’s renewed belligerence towards western tech companies, says Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. It was the first in a barrage of tweets Fedorov used to publicly entreat some 50 companies to suspend or limit Russian users’ access to their products. Fedorov tweeted out a copy of his letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, requesting that the company prevent Russians from accessing the Apple Store. He sent his first request to Apple, where he had good connections after working on a 2021 agreement for the company to support the Diia app and offer training to teachers who use its devices. Melnyk, the ministry adviser, began working on the campaign to pressure tech giants to cut off Russia on the same day the first explosions rocked Kyiv. ![]() She and others have scrambled to adapt platforms and relationships developed to serve dreams of e-government into tools to attack Russia and support Ukraine’s besieged population. “These 15 days of war are like one very long day that never ends,” Ionan, the deputy minister, recently remarked. Since the war began, the ministry’s challenges and working hours have grown further. Courtesy of Ministry of Digital Transformation
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