Ukrainians working at Western tech companies are banding together to help their besieged homeland, aiming to knock down disinformation websites, encourage Russians to turn against their government and speed delivery of medical supplies.
Ukrainians working at Western tech companies are banding together to help their besieged homeland, aiming to knock down disinformation websites, encourage Russians to turn against their government and speed delivery of medical supplies. They are seeking, through email campaigns and online petitions, to persuade firms such as internet security company Cloudflare, Alphabet’s Google and Amazon to do more to counter Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “Companies should try to isolate Russia as much as possible, as soon as possible,” said Olexiy Oryeshko, a staff software engineer at Google and a Ukrainian American. “Sanctions are not enough.” He was one of nine tech activists interviewed by Reuters who are of Ukrainian heritage or are Ukrainian immigrants and are responding to a call by Kyiv to form a volunteer “IT army”. Many companies have severed Russian ties due to new government trade curbs, but the activists are demanding more. They are appealing to cybersecurity companies in particular, asking them to drop Russian clients, especially publishers of what they say is disinformation. If that happens, the publishers would be more vulnerable to online attacks. Igor Seletskiy, chief executive of Palo Alto-based software maker CloudLinux, has pleaded for Cloudflare to drop several Russian news websites.
