How Ukraine built a volunteer IT army from scratch
As Russian bombs began to fall across Ukraine in February 2022, many faced a daunting choice: stay and fight or flee for safety. Among them was Ted, a tech entrepreneur living in Kyiv (who is using a pseudonym for security concerns). Initially taking his family to safety in Lviv, Ted wanted to fight. Lacking military skills, Ted like many other Ukrainians who had a tech background wanted to contribute on other battle fronts.
His wife was a public servant who was well-connected with the Ukrainian government. Through conversations with the Ministry of Digital Transformation, an idea arose to leverage people with tech backgrounds to defend the country on the cyber battlefield. What followed was the historic formation of a volunteer hacker army fighting on Ukraine’s behalf – the world’s first such group in cyber warfare.
The IT Army of Ukraine emerged just two days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 as Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov issued a rallying cry to all volunteers willing to join the hacker ranks of the IT army to help defend Ukraine. He proclaimed, “We continue to fight on the cyber front.”
At its peak, the volunteer IT army’s Telegram channel reached around 300,000 members in March 2022.
Fedorov’s call to action resonates with the historical appeal of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II – Winston Churchill’s famous directive to the SOE was to “set Europe ablaze,” inspiring a similar spirit of resistance in the digital domain.
“We tried to activate every part of society to resist Russia’s war,” Ted said of the early days of the war. Ukrainian officials and volunteers wanted to see how they could leverage the highly talented population of our society, “keeping in mind our software developers and people in the IT sector,” said Ted.
In the early days, organizers focused on the basics, such as creating a Telegram channel and doing the groundwork to get operations going….
