![]() ![]() The initiative, and the projects that have spun out of it over the first 500 days of the war, have also been a vindication of Fedorov and Zelensky’s peacetime vision for the Ukrainian state. “The main point of United24 is not fundraising itself, but keeping people around the world aware of what is going on in Ukraine.” “The same way the president talks to people abroad by broadcasts or on stage, this is the same way United24 speaks to regular people,” he says. It has attracted celebrity endorsements from Hamill to Barbra Streisand to Imagine Dragons, helping to keep the conflict in the public consciousness around the world by giving ordinary people an opportunity to feel like they’re participating in Ukraine’s struggle for survival-something Fedorov says is more important than the money. Since the start of the war, United24 has raised a reported $350 million to buy drones, rebuild homes, and fund demining operations. ![]() The products aren't quite what he had in mind. The process is working exactly as Fedorov envisioned. When he came into government five years ago, Fedorov promised his newly formed Ministry of Digital Transformation would create “tangible products that change the lives of people,” by making the government entrepreneurial and responsive to the needs of the population. We’re talking for five minutes and they give us the green light.” “Just imagine, on the second day of the war, I message the deputy minister. “I think this would be impossible in other countries,” Hrytsenko says. Within a week, the beta version was live. Ajax’s engineers built them another button, and an app. Together, they figured out how the air raid system actually worked: An official in a bunker would get a call from the military, and they would press a button to fire up the sirens. She, in turn, connected him to several local “digital transformation officers”-government officials installed by Fedorov’s ministry in each region of Ukraine, with a brief to find tech solutions to bureaucratic problems. People were already cobbling together their own mutual alert systems using Telegram, but these depended on volunteers finding out when raids were incoming and posting to public groups, making them unreliable and insecure.įrom his car, Hrytsenko called Valeriya Ionan, the deputy minister of digital transformation, whom he knew from years working with the ministry on tech sector projects. The municipal air raid sirens were, in Hrytsenko’s words, “very old-style pieces of shit,” built during the Soviet Union, and often couldn’t be heard. It was the CEO of an IT outsourcing company, who wanted to know if Ajax had any experience with Apple’s critical alert function, which allows governments or emergency services to send alerts to users. On February 25, 2022, as fighter jets dueled low over Kyiv, Ajax’s chief marketing officer, Valentine Hrytsenko, was driving west out of the capital, helping to oversee the evacuation of the company’s manufacturing facilities, when his phone rang. The air alert app was developed by a home security company, Ajax Systems, on the second day of the war, in a process that epitomizes the scrappiness, flexibility, and back-of-the-envelope creativity that have allowed Ukraine to, at times, run its war effort like a startup, under the guidance of its 32-year-old vice prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov. After a week of alerts, the novelty of “May the Force be with you” sounding asynchronously from a dozen phones in the air raid shelter wore off, and it was hard not to start blaming Hamill personally for the attacks. Your overconfidence is your weakness.” In mid-May, following a few months of quiet in the skies over Kyiv, Russia restarted its almost nightly bombardments of cruise missiles and kamikaze drones. Proceed to the nearest shelter,” he says. The first notice of an incoming attack is an ear-splitting whoop-whoop coming out of cell phone speakers, followed by the voice of the Star Wars actor in full Jedi Knight tones. For thousands of Ukrainians, Mark Hamill is the voice of the air raids.
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