Mediaboss Marketing

Officially, the port city of Kherson was one of the first in Ukraine to fall under Russian control.

It's a strategically valuable city, straddling both the Dnieper River and the Black Sea, and home to more than 280,000 people.

Analysts say controlling Kherson offers much to Russia's forces by both blocking Ukraine's access to the sea and linking the territories in Donetsk and Luhansk with the peninsula of Crimea.

But the occupation is not proving comfortable according to messages Sky News has received from a Ukrainian local resistance volunteer in the city on Friday, communicated through a contact in the UK.

Pictures taken over several days from the city show protesters carrying the Ukrainian flag filing past Russian vehicles emblazoned with the letter Z - and Russian soldiers aiming their weapons at civilians.

The messages offer a glimpse of life under Russian occupation. These are the volunteer's words:

Life in Kherson at the moment in relation to other cities is relatively calm.

Fights are going on in the vicinity of the city.

Kherson is completely occupied by Russian invaders.

The military is constantly moving around the city, but the Ukrainian flag continues to hang over the City Council.

The occupants tried to hold a fake referendum, but the population of the city came out to protest and frustrated all their plans.

Due to the complete blockade of the city, there are big problems with food supplies.

The big shops are closed. Mostly small retail outlets operate and agricultural products are brought from the suburbs.

Children sit in shelters; schools and kindergartens do not work. The outskirts of the city are destroyed, many victims among the local population.

The invaders are robbing stores. But life in the city goes on, people help each other.

And in general, the population of the city is patriotic. Glory to Ukraine!

Ukrainian television is turned off in the city today. It is possible to watch the broadcast of Ukrainian TV via the Internet.

Volunteers have organised in the city in different microdistricts, one of them includes me and my friends.

We deliver medicines and products to orphanages and hospitals that are given by businessmen and citizens who are not indifferent.

About the resistance by the occupiers, every day there are demonstrations under Ukrainian flags, thousands of citizens come out to protest.

Of course there are problems with water and electricity, but the city authorities are trying to repair the damage as much as possible.

What will happen next with food is not known, the occupiers do not let the humanitarian cargo pass.

They want the townspeople to take food from them, but no one takes their help. We all believe in the imminent victory of the Ukrainian army.

But a lot depends on the determination and support of our Western friends.

I will not write to you about the hostilities and the participation of me or any of my acquaintances in hostilities or resistance, for obvious reasons.

I can only say that on a signal the Earth will burn under the feet of the invaders.

Read the original here:
Ukraine war: A glimpse inside Kherson, the city occupied by Russian forces, through the eyes of a Ukrainian resistance volunteer - Sky News

Many have called the invasion of Ukraine the worlds first TikTok war, and experts say it is high time for the short video platform once known primarily for silly lip syncs and dance challenge to be taken seriously.

Some politicians are doing just that. In a speech, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, appealed to TikTokers as a group that could help end the war. Last week, Joe Biden spoke to dozens of top users on the app in a first-of-its kind meeting to brief the influencers on the conflict in Ukraine and how the US is addressing it.

But even as world leaders increasingly legitimize the platform, others continue to dismiss it as frivolous. The White House meeting was lampooned on Saturday Night Live in a skit, and mocked relentlessly on Twitter, while the Republican senator Josh Hawley scolded Biden for asking teenagers to do his job.

Experts say this mentality is a mistake.

TikTok is constantly overlooked and deprioritized by people who do not take the time to understand it, said Abbie Richards, an independent researcher who studies the app. Many of the problems we are seeing with it today stem from this false idea that it is just a dancing app.

Ukraine-related content on TikTok has exploded since the country was invaded on 24 February, with videos tagged #Ukraine surpassing 30.5bn views as of 17 March. One report from the New York Times found that, proportionally, Ukraine content on TikTok outpaces that on platforms more than twice its size.

With that dramatic rise came an influx of misinformation and disinformation. Videos of unrelated explosions were re-posted as if they were from Ukraine. Media uploaded from video games were passed off as footage of real-life events. Russian propaganda went viral before it could be removed.

We saw immediately from the start of the conflict that TikTok was structurally incompatible with the needs of the current moment regarding disinformation, Richards said.

TikTok has a number of features that make it uniquely susceptible to such issues, according to a paper published by Harvards Shorenstein Center on Media titled TikTok, the War on Ukraine, and 10 Features that Make the App Vulnerable to Misinformation.

Its core features prime it for remixing media, allowing users to upload videos and sound clips without attributing their origins, the paper said, which makes it difficult to contextualize and factcheck videos. This has created a digital atmosphere in which it is difficult even for seasoned journalists and researchers to discern truth from rumor, parody and fabrication, researchers added.

Design features within the app also create an easy pathway for misinformation, researchers say. Users post mostly under pseudonyms; the date of upload for videos is not prominently displayed, complicating attempts to contextualize content; and the newsfeed structure with each video taking up the entirety of a users screen makes it difficult to seek out additional sources.

Unlike on Facebook, where the users feed is filled primarily with content from friends and people they know, TikToks for you page is largely content from strangers determined by the companys opaque algorithm.

And the more a platform relies on algorithms rather than a chronological newsfeed, the more susceptible it can be to mis- and disinformation, experts say. That is because algorithms favor content that gets more engagement.

One thing that is common across all platforms is that algorithms are optimized to detect and exploit cognitive biases for more polarizing content, said Marc Faddoula, a researcher at the TikTok Observatory where he studies the platform and its content policies. Disinformation is very engaging for users, so it is more likely to appear on feeds.

These issues are exacerbated by the age and size of TikTok. The app is relatively young, launched in 2016, and has grown rapidly to 130m in the United States and more than 1bn globally. Though smaller than Facebook, which has 230m users in the US and 2.9bn globally, the platform is facing many of the same issues with fewer resources and less experience.

TikTok is continuing to evolve after it saw usership soar during the pandemic-induced lockdowns of 2020, said Emily Dreyfuss, a researcher at Harvards Shorenstein Center on Media who co-authored the research paper.

That is when we really started to see a shift from what people thought was just an app for teenagers to do viral dance tricks to a real part of the cultural conversation, she said.

TikTok has, like many other social media companies, scrambled to keep up with the onslaught of disinformation about the war in Ukraine.

It uses a combination of algorithms and human moderators to manage the platform, spokeswoman Jamie Favazza told the Guardian, with teams that speak more than 60 languages and dialects including Russian and Ukrainian. It has rushed out the launch of a state-controlled media policy to address propaganda put out by Russian entities.

We continue to respond to the war in Ukraine with increased safety and security resources to detect emerging threats and remove harmful misinformation, Favazza said.

Meanwhile TikTok added digital literacy tips on its Discover page to help our community evaluate and make decisions about the content they view online. It has for years voluntarily released transparency reports about what content it has removed.

But researchers say there is more to be done. Despite these moves, some state-controlled media accounts such as RT remain on the app, though access to them has been banned in the EU.

Richards, the TikTok researcher, noted that a disinformation campaign she studied for a recent report remains on the platform, with dozens of videos using the caption Russian Lives Matter continuing to rack up thousands of views.

In many ways TikTok has been far more responsive to criticism than its predecessors, including social media giants such as Facebook. But while the company is dutifully flagging misinformation and cracking down on Russian state content, reining in disinformation on a mass scale is becoming more complicated than ever as influencers power grows.

Well-followed accounts have an outsized influence on what media their followers consume, regardless of how much expertise they actually have in a given subject matter. Studies show consumers are substantially more likely to trust a recommendation from someone they follow on social media than a traditional advertisement, and the same goes for information shared online.

TikTok is driven by a culture that values individual creators and platform-specific microcelebrities, the Shorenstein Center paper argued, making influencers and people with large followings particularly susceptible to inadvertently sharing inaccurate or manipulated content.

Influencers have great incentive to enter the discourse about a breaking news event or ongoing crisis, since these posts can boost users profiles; even one viral video can popularize an entire account, the paper said.

Meanwhile, very few checks and balances exist in terms of how they operate in the online media space, said Dreyfuss, noting that they operate in similar media spaces as journalists with far less training or media literacy, such as how to factcheck false claims that even seasoned researchers struggle to detect.

There is no formal accountability for influencers and they are often catering only to the whims of their fans, Dreyfuss said.

Experts say it is urgent that legislators and the general public take this collision of massive influence with little accountability seriously. In inviting top influencers to the White House, the Biden administration took a meaningful step in that direction.

For their part, influencers are also recognizing the power that they hold. One 18-year-old TikTok star with more than 10.5m followers told the Washington Post she sees herself as a White House correspondent for Gen Z who is there to relay the information in a more digestible manner.

Continued here:
TikTok was just a dancing app. Then the Ukraine war started - The Guardian

There is a fascinating tension in the British attitude to war and military matters. When he wrote about England in 1941, George Orwell said his home country was defined by the gentleness of its civilisation, and such a hatred of war and militarism that flag-waving and patriotic boasting were always the preserve of a small minority. Events over the past 40 or so years have perhaps proved him wrong: from time to time, a widely shared jingoism has been brought to the surface of our national life, focused either on actual conflict as happened when Britain fought for the Falkland Islands or some hare-brained proxy for it, such as Brexit. But there is something about Orwells portrayal of people with an innate distaste for bellicose posturing that still rings true, across all the countries of the United Kingdom.

Among certain politicians, by contrast, there is far too little of that kind of thinking. Over the past three weeks, the unimaginable awfulness of what has happened in Ukraine and the fact that Vladimir Putins invasion is such a matter of moral clarity has encouraged a lot of rhetoric and posturing that has been shrill, banal and full of a misplaced machismo. The war, says one Tory MP, is Boris Johnsons Falklands moment. The vocal Conservative backbencher Tobias Ellwood a former soldier in the Royal Green Jackets, and now an active reservist insists that the wests response shows weve lost our appetite, weve lost our confidence to stand up: to stand tall. And while he and other Tory MPs including zealous believers in Britain breaking from the EU, suddenly holding forth about the urgent need for international unity have been making sense-defying demands for Nato to impose a no-fly zone, some of the cabinet have come out with their own very unsettling pronouncements, seemingly thinking that if Putin talks tough, they should talk tougher. When Sajid Javid was asked about the recent Russian attack on a Ukrainian military base only about 10 miles from the countrys border with Poland, we saw the strange spectacle of the health secretary apparently embracing the prospect of nuclear war: Lets be very clear if a single Russian toecap steps into Nato territory, there will be war with Nato.

With the chancellor Rishi Sunaks spring statement arriving on Wednesday, a familiar sound is getting louder: Conservatives demanding more money for the military, even though the UK currently spends the fifth-largest annual sum in the world (after the US, China, India and Russia). For well over a decade now, most Tories have been united in the belief that just about every public service is best cut to the bone and subjected to endless lectures about inefficiency. But defence is suddenly a glaring exception: Labour may have credibly identified 13bn of departmental waste since 2010, but that seems to be no barrier to calls for a spending rise of about 25%.

If you want a flavour of the thinking at work, a good place to start is a recent piece in the Sunday Telegraph by the former Brexit minister David Frost. He reckons that western muscle memory is returning and we are getting back to the principles that helped us to win the cold war. He says: We are going to have to spend more on defence and that will mean tough choices. We all know what those are likely to be: the price of our supposedly central role in a reshaped world may well be paid in social care, education, childrens services and all the rest.

Though he would presumably express opposition to cuts elsewhere, Keir Starmer has joined in the calls for more military cash, which snugly fits the Im not Jeremy Corbyn narrative of his leadership. Given Starmers apparent determination to follow the example set by his New Labour forebears, and Tony Blairs recent offer to help his old party with policy advice, we should be listening hard to what the latter has to say. Last week, he published an essay about the Ukraine crisis. Its most sobering passage ran thus: When Putin is threatening Nato and stoking fear of nuclear conflict, there is something incongruous about our repeated assurance to him that we will not react with force. Naturally enough, Blair also wants more money for the armed forces. We are awake, he says. Now we must act. This the same register he used at the start of the war on terror, when he talked about shaken kaleidoscopes and the need to reorder this world around us. Hearing it again is not exactly reassuring.

As is usually the case, Boris Johnsons tone swings between the serious and utterly crass. At this weekends Tory spring conference, he and his colleagues parroted the familiar argument that the war demands an end to woke ideas and criticisms of British history (which actually sounds like a milquetoast version of Putinism), and he made that grotesque comparison of Ukrainians to Brexit voters. When caught in a more sensible mood, he has also counselled a measure of caution and level-headedness. Its very important that we dont get locked into any kind of logic of direct conflict between the west and Russia because thats how Putin wants to portray it as a fight between him and Nato, he told the Economist last week. It isnt. This is about the Ukrainian people and their right to defend themselves. This line was repeated on Sunday. But around him, there still swirl very dangerous currents.

Back in the 1980s, as Ronald Reagan speculated about a limited nuclear war in Europe and we were warned about the prospect of an accidental nuclear exchange, I grew up with a cold sense of fear. Now a new generation has to face not just those same anxieties, but the existential threat of the climate emergency and the prospect of regular global pandemics. Not surprisingly, there is a growing crisis in childhood mental health: a sign not just of failing public services, but arguably of a system of power and politics that does not ease such visceral fears, instead endlessly inflaming them.

In a situation as fragile as this, belligerent talk can have terrifying consequences. It also tends to highlight the way Westminsters armchair generals neglect their duty of care to their own citizens. I am now having conversations with my 12-year-old daughter about the prospect of nuclear annihilation. I tell her itll be all right, but her and my fears are hardly helped by the reckless words we sporadically hear from some of those supposedly in charge.

Yes, the world has clearly changed. Even if liberal values are always damaged and compromised by people in power, that does not mean that they are not still the best hope we have, something Putins passage into something close to fascism makes plain. But those same values not to mention the delicate stuff of geopolitics and diplomacy demand nuance and calm. Moreover, there is one thing we overlook at our peril: that however much we spend on our military, our social fabric needs to be resilient and secure enough to cope with a new reality of constant shocks and disruptions, and at the moment it is anything but. In this dreadful moment, these seem to be things in danger of being forgotten. I worry about that. I think we all should.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist. To listen to Johns podcast Politics Weekly UK, search Politics Weekly UK on Apple, Spotify, Acast or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday

See the original post:
The Tories bellicose posturing on Ukraine is dangerous - and unfair to us - The Guardian

ODESSA, Ukraine Ukrainian forces carried out counter-offensives against Russian positions on Wednesday, seeking to inflict what one official called maximum losses, even as the invading Russian military stepped up its lethal attacks on cities.

In Mariupol, an airstrike destroyed a theater where about 1,000 people had taken shelter, according to city and regional administrators, and photos and videos posted online showed the burning wreckage of the building.

Officials in Mariupol, the besieged southern city that has suffered the most intense bombardment, said they could not yet estimate the number of casualties among civilians, who might have been in a bomb shelter beneath the theater. The strike came as 11,000 residents evacuated the city on Wednesday, according to its City Council.

In a video address to Ukrainians early Thursday morning, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine called for more sanctions against Russia and said it was a terrorist state.

Our hearts are broken by what Russia is doing to our people, he said, to our Mariupol.

After falling back under a relentless pounding over the wars first weeks, Ukrainian troops tried to gain some momentum with counterattacks on Russian positions outside of Kyiv and in the Russian-occupied city of Kherson, in Ukraines south, a senior Ukrainian military official said.

Rather than seek to regain lost territory, Ukrainian forces tried to cause as much destruction and death as possible, attacking Russian troops and equipment with tanks, fighter jets and artillery, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military information.

In the task of inflicting maximum losses, weve done excellently, the official said.

American intelligence officials said their conservative estimate of Russian troop deaths was at least 7,000, a staggering number that carries implications for both combat effectiveness and morale. Western defense and intelligence agencies estimate that Ukraine also has suffered thousands of combatants killed.

Mr. Zelensky addressed Congress via video link on Wednesday, asking for more aid, and President Biden promised more weaponry. The administration plans to provide Ukraine with high-tech defensive weapons that are easily portable and require little training or logistical support to use, according to U.S. and European officials.

Meanwhile, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia falsely accused Ukraine of seeking weapons of mass destruction and asserted that what he called an economic blitzkrieg by the West, aimed at destroying Russia, had failed.

Mr. Putin also sneered at Russians who oppose the war, saying the Russian people could distinguish true patriots from the scum and the traitors, and just to spit them out like a midge that accidentally flew into their mouths.

In a televised videoconference with top officials, he once again falsely described the government in Kyiv, led by a Jewish president and prime minister, as being pro-Nazi and on its way to acquiring nuclear weapons. Their aim, of course, would have been Russia, he said.

And then he went deeper into unreality, accusing the government in Kyiv of disregard for the suffering of the Ukrainian people that his own forces were bombing every day.

The fact that people are dying, that hundreds of thousands, millions have become refugees, that there is a real humanitarian catastrophe in cities held by neo-Nazis and armed criminals, he said. Theyre indifferent.

Ukrainian and Russian negotiators held a third consecutive day of talks on a possible settlement to the conflict, and in typical fashion, the Kremlin left a muddy picture of its intentions. Mr. Putins bellicose, often false statements, larded with World War II references, clashed with more conciliatory comments from his underlings.

But little appeared to have changed on the battlefield. The war in Ukraine, about to enter its fourth week, has become a grinding daily slog with little evidence of significant gains for either side.

Details of the Ukrainian offensive could not be fully established independently, though several top Ukrainian officials, including key aides to Mr. Zelensky, confirmed that the counterattacks were underway.

In Kyiv, missile strikes and heavy artillery sounded overnight and in the early morning on Wednesday in exchanges in the outlying suburbs that were notably heavier and louder than in previous days. Two people were wounded and a residential building was damaged in a strike that landed near the city zoo, the second time in two days that shells have landed close to the city center.

Satellite pictures from Tuesday showed heavy black smoke above the Kherson airport, where the senior military official said Ukrainian forces had targeted parked Russian military aircraft.

Kherson was the first (and so far, only) major city to be fully taken over by Russian forces, which have turned it into a forward military base from which they have launched attacks on surrounding cities and villages, according to Ukrainian officials. On Tuesday, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that it had taken control of the entire Kherson region, giving Russian forces a significant foothold in southern Ukraine that Ukraines military will have difficulty dislodging.

Even so, neither side can be said to have made much progress militarily. The Institute for the Study of War, which has been tracking developments closely, noted in a Tuesday evening assessment that, for nearly two weeks, Russian forces have not been conducting extensive simultaneous attacks that would allow them to seize control of multiple areas at once in Ukraine. And they are unlikely to do so in the next week, it said.

In the absence of significant military gains, Russian forces on Wednesday continued a campaign of terror against Ukrainian civilians.

At least 10 people were killed when a Russian strike hit a bread line in Chernihiv, a city north of Kyiv that has been subject to intense shelling by Russian troops seeking to move on the capital. Ukraines prosecutor generals office said in a statement that the attack occurred at about 10 a.m. as people were lined up at a grocery store. Photos released by the prosecutors office showed several bodies scattered around a dirt yard.

Using heavy artillery, cruise missiles and fighter jets, Russian forces have systematically targeted civilian areas with no military presence, striking apartment buildings, schools and hospitals in cities and villages all over a broad front in the north, east and south of Ukraine. The attacks may have killed thousands of civilians, though reaching a precise count of the dead has been impossible.

Saying it was profoundly concerned by Russias use of force, the International Court of Justice ordered Russia on Wednesday to suspend its military operations immediately, pending its full review of a case submitted by Ukraine last month. However, the order was not expected to lead to any immediate cessation in the onslaught.

According to the United Nations, at least 726 civilians have been killed, including 64 children, since the invasion began on Feb. 24, though its figures do not include areas where fighting has been heaviest, like Kharkiv and Mariupol. In Mariupol alone, which has been turned into a hellscape of burning and decimated buildings, local authorities say at least 2,400 have been killed, and probably far more.

In Kharkiv, Ukraines second largest city, the municipal emergency services agency first reported on Wednesday that 500 civilians had been killed since the war began, but then revised that number to 100 later in the day. In any case, the agency said in a statement on Facebook, the true number of deaths could be much higher, noting that emergency workers were continuing to scour the rubble of residential neighborhoods for more bodies, often under fire.

Mr. Zelenskys appeal to Congress on Wednesday was in part a desperate effort to obtain the weaponry and defenses capable of fending off such attacks. Central to this appeal was a call for a no-fly zone to be imposed over Ukraine, aimed at preventing Russian fighter jets, which cause severe destruction, from operating over Ukrainian territory. Close the sky has become a rallying cry for Ukrainian officials and regular citizens.

Russia has turned the Ukrainian sky into a source of death for thousands of people, Mr. Zelensky said.

Knowing that the request had little chance of being approved, given that it would thrust American pilots into direct confrontation with the Russians, Mr. Zelensky quickly pivoted to something to which Republicans and Democrats have been far more receptive: asking for more weapons to enable his people to keep up the fight themselves.

Mr. Biden announced $800 million in new military aid to Ukraine, including antiaircraft and antitank missiles, body armor, vehicles, drones and small arms, bringing to $2 billion the amount delivered or pledged since early last year. But as expected, he did not offer to deliver warplanes or enforce a no-fly zone.

The United States and its allies have relied primarily on financial sanctions that are already devastating the Russian economy.

Russian officials close to the talks said Wednesday there had been signs of progress, though even there, the picture was unclear. They said the idea of a neutral Ukraine, with a status like that of Sweden or Austria, was on the table, which their Ukrainian counterparts disputed.

Sergey V. Lavrov, Russias foreign minister, told a Russian television network that the status of the Russian language and Russian news outlets in Ukraine were under discussion, and that there are concrete formulas that are close to being agreed on.

Michael Schwirtz reported from Odessa, Ukraine; Valerie Hopkins from Lviv, Ukraine; and Carlotta Gall from Kyiv. Reporting was contributed by Anton Troianovski and Ivan Nechepurenko from Istanbul, and Richard Prez-Pea from New York.

More here:
What Happened on Day 21 of Russias Invasion of Ukraine - The New York Times

Cryptocurrencies have taken on an unprecedented role in the war in Ukraine, helping the government raise millions of dollars to fund its fight against the Russian invasion.

Why has Ukraine turned to cryptocurrencies, and how is the nascent crypto industry changing its reputation and having an effect amid the clouds of war?

At the outset of the conflict, Ukrainian officials posted addresses for two crypto wallets on their Twitter account, giving donors a direct and clear address to which to send contributions.

The wallets attracted more than $10.2m (9.2 million euros) just four days after the start of the invasion.

Since then, more than $100m worth of crypto has been raised, with the Crypto Fund for Ukraine run by Michael Chobanian the founder of the Ukrainian crypto exchange Kuna accounting for 60 percent of all donations.

We are still collecting crypto. It is being spent on aid like daily rations and bullet-proof vests and helmets, the 37-year-old Ukrainian told AFP.

Initially, two funds were set up, one for humanitarian purposes and the other to support the Ukrainian military.

However, after the violence escalated across Ukraine, the funds were merged and focused fully on supporting the military, said Chobanian.

He said that the majority of crypto donations came in the form of Bitcoin, Ethereum and the stablecoin Tether a coin pegged one-to-one to the dollar.

Aid packages sent to Ukraine in fiat money from the United States and the European Union dwarf cryptocurrency donations, but the latter allow individuals to get involved.

US crypto charity, The Giving Block, told AFP that cryptocurrency donations have the potential to attract younger donors who are looking to support various causes.

Another reason crypto donations are of value to Ukraine is because they are less influenced by geopolitical or macroeconomic factors. Chobanian points to the depreciation in the value of the Ukrainian hryvnia as a result of inflation.

An extra advantage of donating in cryptocurrencies is the speed of the transfers. Bank wires may take up to 24 hours to be validated between two countries. However, cryptocurrency transfers typically take less time.

Despite the success of crypto in aiding the Ukrainian war effort, it has not always been a smooth ride.

In the early days of the conflict, the deputy minister for digital transformation wanted to issue Ukraines own crypto as a symbolic gesture for Kyivs cause, but the project was eventually cancelled.

To make matters worse, people seized the opportunity to mint and market fake versions of the planned government-issued crypto.

There was a lack of communication within the government, said Chobanian, who now works closely with the ministry.

It was the first day of the war, he recalls.

Moreover, cryptocurrencies have become a staple part of Ukraines shadow economy used as a medium of exchange in online crime, tax avoidance and capital flight.

According to data analytics firm Chainalysis, transactions from Eastern Europe to other regions are particularly high, and the company suggests that capital flight could account for some of the crypto movement in the area.

Despite the risks associated with crypto, Chobanian is confident that it will become a core part of the Ukrainian economy.

When we win the war, we will rebuild Ukraine using blockchain technology. All of us were helped by crypto, he said.

While Chobanians aspirations may be very ambitious, they are based on real developments.

On Wednesday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy passed a law that would provide a legislative framework for crypto platforms and users to operate within the country.

Caroline Malcolm, head of international public policy and research at Chainalysis, told AFP that the conflict in Ukraine is forcing governments to develop their understanding of cryptocurrencies and their regulation.

She believes that such discussions can be beneficial to the crypto industry, leading to proportionate and effective regulatory policies.

As of last week, US President Joe Biden signed an executive order seeking further clarification and guidance on crypto regulation showing Washingtons willingness to contend with an ever-growing and new asset class.

More here:
Bitcoin to the rescue: Cryptocurrencies role in Ukraine - Al Jazeera English