World Stage: Ukraine with Alex Bornyakov

The war in Ukraine is being fought on multiple fronts. Alex Bornyakov, deputy minister of digital transformation of Ukraine, joins Washington Post technology policy reporter Cat Zakrzewski to discuss his country’s efforts to pressure tech companies to come to Ukraine’s aid and wage what is being called the world’s first “crypto war.”

Highlights

“To be fair, almost all of them just said, ‘Yeah, we’re moving out.’ But unfortunately, some of them just made an announcement but didn’t really act. For example, IBM, Intel, SAP and companies like Microsoft they are still in a process. They announced and what we see is they’re not really moving anywhere…Maybe they pretend, maybe this is real but what we see is that some of them not reacting really quickly.”- Alex Bornyakov (Video: Washington Post Live)

“During the first day when we were moving there was really bad internet…Once we received the first satellite, we set it up and the speed is really great. And the connection is good. Now I know like thousands of Starlinks in Ukraine. Been using for different purposes, even in war zones. But my personal experience, is that the service is great.”- Alex Bornyakov (Video: Washington Post Live)

“It’s like instinct if you want to survive you have to act. You can’t just lie down. We had a number of connections with big tech companies before the war, so it was not just purely from scratch just trying into reach out to them. We knew people and we realized at first we need to start blocking some tracking apps, some propaganda websites and also spread our word…At the beginning we were just trying to minimize the impact of their invasion…On the second day it turned out that they checked Google or Waze because they can see where there’s a traffic jam…and they can strike there. So, we reached out to them, asked them to disable this functionality.”- Alex Bornyakov (Video: Washington Post Live)

Alex Bornyakov

Ukraine Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation