Join the Keyboard Army to Support Ukraine People

The whole world has been following the Russian-Ukrainian war for a week. If you’re willing to lend a hand to Ukrainian people and feel that you might be more useful with your keyboard rather than an armament, you can discover what are the ways of helping Ukraine remotely.

Here is an adaptation of an article by Yaroslav Anzhiuk’s article published in the “Ukrayinska Pravda” newspaper.

How to stop the war with the help of  a keyboard:

• Write, draw, create, hack, code, organize, explain, use your acquaintances and connections, persuade, deliver information to the whole world.

1. Journalists and authors — your work is priceless. Anyone who has a significant audience in social media, especially the foreign one — use it. It is your duty. You don’t have the right to remain silent.
2. Designers, illustrators, and artists. You create a picture that can be seen by the whole world. It is your opportunity, as well as a responsibility, to use your talent.
3. Philosophers, inventors, the imaginative ones, you have to focus only on one thing — how to defeat the aggressor and stop the war.
4. Break Russian governmental and military websites, accounts of propagandists and those in power, infrastructural facilities, and whatever you can access. Involve your friends and colleagues from all over the world. This is war.
5. Think of what you can code and do it. Coordinate with other groups and ask which help they need. Come up with ideas which products might address the urgent matters.
6. Excel sheets are your weapon. Logistics, people management, and systematicity are your superpowers. Coordinate the groups, make up the lists of those in need, unite the groups which have similar tasks to increase productivity.
7. Use your acquaintances and connections. We want every famous Western celebrity to voice their support of Ukraine. We want Mask, the Kardashians, and Zendaya to appeal on:

• blocking SWIFT for Russia;
• closing the airspace over Ukraine;
• sending Ukraine more ammunition;
• boycotting all Russian products;
• stopping any cooperation with Russians who haven’t spoken out publicly against war;
• using all their influence to stop the war.

Knowing someone who knows a senator, or the Bundestag deputy, is also about connections. Work with them to achieve positive results.

8. Persuade whenever it can be effective. Seek for the arguments supporting important theses for Ukraine, and share them online to arm with them those to whom it might be useful.
9. If you know a reporter from the world’s leading newspaper or a narrow-profile one, this is great. Tell them what is going on here, and which help we require, or direct them to anyone who can inform them.

• Speak to Russians.

1. The majority of people in Russia do not want this war — remember it. They don’t understand why it happens, they don’t want the deaths of their sons and friends, they don’t want sanctions, and they don’t want to have Putin — his rating before the war was 30%, and even these numbers were exaggerated. Now it must be dramatically dropping.
2. They don’t know the whole truth from the state media, but they can get it from social media, celebrities’ statements, photos, and videos from the world media.
3. There are people who are not afraid of going on the streets to protest and are not afraid of speaking out publicly. They have to be supported, their material has to be spread and shared with Russian acquaintances. There should be many more of them.
4. Explain the real reasons and consequences of this war. Maintain the polemic. Be emotional, but without personal hatred. Russians who don’t want to have war are our allies in this situation — not enemies.
5. What Russians can do, both living in and out of Russia:

• go out to protest;
• speak out publicly in their social media;
• sign the petitions;
• demand the stop of the war;
• demand the resignation of the Russian president and government;
• condemn war in certain territorial districts of Russia;
• block the troops on the Russian military bases;
• overthrow the government in Russia by force;
• do the things mentioned in the first block of the article.

Share this post — it is necessary that the keyboard troops are armed with ideas for action.

Article is provided by representatives of Kyiv-Mohyla University who have made their services available to provide accurate, timely, on-the-ground reporting about the war in Ukraine, including nuanced localized ongoing updates on what is happening across the country, as well as commentary and analysis.