- Russia invaded Ukraine last month, causing widespread devastation and forcing millions to evacuate.
- Now, Ukrainian software developers are helping the defense effort — both online and off.
- While some take up arms, others are attacking Russian websites and using code to spread awareness.
Michael Bodnarchuk was one of the millions of Ukrainians who fled Kyiv, the country’s capital city, when Russian forces began launching attacks last month. But after arriving safely in Uzhgorod, an Ukranian city that borders Slovakia, with his wife and children, the 34-year-old software developer turned around and headed straight back.
Food, blankets, and generators in tow, Bodnarchuk spent the next six days driving to Kyiv with a friend to supply resources. After making the delivery, they transported 24 refugees to safety, some to the Lviv railway station and others all the way back to Uzhgorod. The journey was long and winding, with bombed highways and tense checkpoints forcing them to take longer routes.
But Bodnarchuk was able to find some solace on the road, specifically when he was in the passenger’s seat coding. Sometimes for fun and sometimes working on deliverables for clients, he said it was a welcome distraction from the stress of war.
“Coding helped me to think about something else,” Bodnarchuk told Insider.
Ukraine is a hub for tech professionals like Bodnarchuk, with roughly 200,000 technologists employed in the country working for Ukrainian startups and Silicon Valley companies like Google, Snap, and Oracle. Refusing to feel defeated by the Russian invasion, many have been using their tech skills to raise their spirits and launch side projects to help the defense effort.
Insider talked to eight Ukrainian developers about how they were mounting a defense both online and off, from attacking Russian websites and creating bots to combat disinformation to picking up artillery. Some believe it’s only right to do what they can to fight the Russian invasion, and others are seeking a distraction and sense of normality during the chaos.
“There’s no shortage of ideas,” Vadim Demedes, a 27-year old Ukrainian software developer, said. “There’s only a shortage of time.”
Oleksii Holub is spreading awareness through code
For Ukrainian developers looking to put their coding skills directly to work, open-source software has risen as a way for them to try to make a difference.
For example, Oleksii Holub, a software developer from Kyiv who is sheltering in Lviv, a city in western Ukraine, is using his already popular GitHub projects to spread awareness. His application that reduces eyestrain, Discord bot that exports chat history, and app that lets users download YouTube videos each have thousands of stars (or likes). Recently, Holub added disclaimers to all those projects, saying that if a user decided to use the repositories, they must implicitly agree to condemn Russia and its military aggression against Ukraine.
The disclaimer goes on to ask users to recognize that Russia unlawfully invaded a sovereign state and support Ukraine’s territorial integrity, including its claims over the occupied territories of Crimea and the Donbass. It also asks users to agree to reject false narratives perpetuated by Russian state propaganda.
Holub is also coding new projects specifically geared toward the effort, such as tool that helps people spell Ukrainian names correctly in English (such as Kyiv).
“I realized a lot of the users who use my software libraries don’t realize that all of these things that are happening here also impact them in a way,” Holub told Insider. “Because for example, if I die, then there will be nobody maintaining that software anymore.”
—Oleksii Holub🇺🇦 (@Tyrrrz) March 16, 2022
Vadim Demedes is creating bots to fight Russian propaganda
Similarly, there’s the 27-year-old software developer Demedes, who grew up in Khmelnytskyi, a city about 223 miles west of Kyiv. He had been apartment hunting in Kyiv following stints working for various San Francisco tech startups in Poland and Canada. After evacuating the city center and reaching safety, he was quick to jump back into technical tasks.
Like many other Ukrainians, Demedes refused to feel defeated by the Russian invasion. He used his skills to launch several side projects — some to raise spirits, like a website where Ukrainians can input the dreams they have for when the war is over, and others to combat disinformation, like a bot that kicks users off Telegram for spreading Russian propaganda.
Denys Dovhan is fighting back with DDOS attacks
Denys Dovhan, a 25-year-old software developer at the web-development firm Wix, also decided to take his fight online by joining the “IT army” after fleeing Kyiv.
He said he spent his time helping run distributed denial-of-service attacks on Russian websites. These types of attacks disrupt the traffic of a server, ultimately overwhelming it and leaving it vulnerable to other kinds of cyberattacks.
He told Insider he was not a hacker but let others in the IT army remotely control his computer at night to attack Russian servers — called a botnet. During the day, he helps organize attacks on Russian websites, mail and flight services, and banking systems.
“It is very strange to watch videos about places you used to visit all the time and see those places bombed and changed visually because of war,” Dovhan said. “And I understand that eventually this war will be over, and, hopefully, I will get back to Kyiv, but I understand that it won’t be the city that I left.”
Volodymyr Shymanskyy is promoting solidarity on GitHub
Volodymyr Shymanskyy is another software engineer and a cofounder of the Internet of Things platform Blynk. He had just finished building his first house in Irpin when the war started. His house has since been destroyed by Russian forces, and while he’s devastated, he’s trying to focus his energy on work and raising awareness online through GitHub repositories.
For example, he created a custom Ukrainian-flag banner users can add to their profiles, which was included in GitHub’s release radar. The repository also includes resources that allow people to “stand with Ukraine,” such as donation sites, advice for boycotting Russian companies, and guidance on avoiding propaganda. The repository also includes a list of projects that support Ukraine.
“I wouldn’t just sit there and do nothing,” Shymanskyy told Insider. “So basically, I do whatever I can with the spare time I have.”
—vsh 🇺🇦 (@vshymanskyy) March 14, 2022
Vladimir Agafonkin is volunteering his IT expertise
There’s also Vladimir Agafonkin, a software engineer at Mapbox who evacuated Kyiv and resides in Khmelnytskyi. On a usual day, he said he’d balance work, strength training, and baking “a lot” of sourdough bread. Now that his country is at war, he’s doing everything he can to lend his support.
Besides donating to various local funds and buying supplies for local volunteers helping refugees, he started consulting for IT teams working on volunteer projects.
“I also managed to work in the last few days — it’s a good distraction, and there’s a general sentiment in Ukraine that people who can keep working should do so to help keep the economy running,” Agafonkin told Insider. “We had to get used to the air-raid sirens — they happen around four times per day on average here.”
He added: “Whatever happens, Ukrainians remain hopeful and strongly believe we will persevere, rebuild everything they destroyed, and come out stronger than ever before.”
Illya Klymov is helping on the ground, establishing supply routes and directing aid
Illya Klymov, a senior front-end developer at the open-source firm GitLab, decided to stay in Kharkiv rather than evacuate so he could help civilians.
“As a software engineer, I obviously had multiple opportunities to leave the country to go to the Silicon Valley,” Klymov said, adding that he planned to stay and help rebuild his town once the war was over.
Living only 2 kilometers away from the Kharkiv Regional State Administration building in Freedom Square that was heavily shelled, he said simple tasks such as running errands quickly became a “pretty much unavoidable gamble with your life.”
“I was joking that the new rules on the road are not just looking to the left and to the right but also looking up constantly,” Klymov told Insider.
He described his downtown apartment as “the eye of the storm” and said he and his girlfriend slept in shifts, in case they need to move quickly to the nearby parking garage turned shelter.
On a regular day, Klymov used to wake up about 10 a.m., work for GitLab a few hours, and then make educational coding videos for fun. Now, he said his tasks changed day-to-day depending on the needs of the citizens of Kharkiv — from establishing supply routes to directing humanitarian aid. He still works for GitLab when he isn’t volunteering. He said it really helped him “in terms of mental health.”
“GitLab was extremely supportive in terms of both economical support and using our unlimited PTO policy, and it was my decision to work for them,” Klymov said. “It helps me because I love to code.”
Ihor Dvoretskyi joined the armed forces to physically protect Lviv
Ihor Dvoretskyi, a senior developer advocate for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, also took physical measures to support Ukraine by joining the Territorial Defense Forces. He spends his days protecting Lviv, and his day job has been more than supportive of his decision to join the armed forces, he said.
“Nobody told me I shouldn’t join the military forces,” Dvoretskyi said. “They’re like, ‘Do whatever you need to do. Do whatever you feel that is important for you and for your family and for your life and for your country. We’ll take care of everything else.'”
—ihor dvoretskyi 🇺🇦 (@idvoretskyi) March 14, 2022
He added that even though he had the technical capacity to join online forces like the ad-hoc IT army, he felt his “biggest priority” was to defend the physical city from the Russian invasion.
“There is no safe place here, in this country at this moment,” Dvoretskyi said. “The biggest goal for me right now is to protect the city where I’m based.”