Ukraine’s techies urge: ‘isolate Russia’ in race to mobilise Silicon Valley
- Big Tech companies like Cloudflare, Google and Amazon are being urged by Ukrainian IT activists working in the West to do more to counter the invasion by Russia
- ‘Companies should try to isolate Russia as much as possible, as soon as possible,’ said Olexiy Oryeshko, software engineer at Google and a Ukrainian American
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 Inc, Alphabet Inc’s Google and Amazon.com Inc 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.