Tech 4 Dem
Campaigning for Ukraine’s presidential election had just begun to heat up when the authorities announced they had thwarted a Russian plot to use Facebook to undermine the vote, The New York Times reports:
Unlike the 2016 interference in the United States, which centered on fake Facebook pages created by Russians in faraway St. Petersburg, the operation in Ukraine this year had a clever twist. It tried to circumvent Facebook’s new safeguards by paying Ukrainian citizens to give a Russian agent access to their personal pages.
In a video confession published by the S.B.U., Ukraine’s domestic intelligence service, a man it identified as the Russian agent said that he resided in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, and that his Russian handlers had ordered him “to find people in Ukraine on Facebook who wanted to sell their accounts or temporarily rent them out.”
Fed up with the same old politicians and disgusted by broken promises of reform, Ukraine’s voters are seriously contemplating a risky choice, notes Melinda Haring, the editor of the UkraineAlert blog at the Atlantic Council and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Only three candidates are truly viable: two well-known politicians—incumbent President Petro Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko—and an inexperienced comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Poroshenko is an oligarch, and the other two likely have oligarchic interests behind them, she writes for The American Interest:
Ukrainians are active in public life and every reform that was put into place since the Maidan is the direct result of pressure from civil society, Western governments, and international financial institutions. The West must continue to vocally support civil society activists who face massive pressure and physical threats, as well as its small but powerful independent media outlets like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Schemes and Bihus.info.
It is worth appreciating for a moment that no one can say for sure who will eventually become the president of Ukraine. In an election that is not preordained, Ukrainians’ votes will truly matter. That distinguishes Ukraine from its regional counterparts, especially from its large neighbor to the north, adds David J. Kramer/ @ACEurasia. Read More →
