On one hand, crypto ecosystems have allowed Ukraine’s government to quickly raise more than $60 million in digital assets to support its war effort without having to rely solely on banks or the bond market.
Those are donations. They would have reached them as well if they were processed through normal banks. The Ukrainian government has bank accounts and banking is working in Ukraine outside of the literal warzones. Crypto has added absolutely nothing to that equation except maybe encouraging crypto bros who wouldn’t normally dream of donating money to anyone to do so in order to “prove” the supremacy of their beanie babies.
With ruble-denominated crypto trades surging, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong made a similar case, saying he had seen evidence of ordinary Russian citizens using crypto “as a lifeline now that their currency has collapsed,” he tweeted on March 4 “Many of them likely oppose what their country is doing, and a ban would hurt them, too.”
As hard as it is to hear and as little as politicians want to admit it, the point of sanctions like this is to hurt the normal people, so they get fed up with their government. Thus they are absolutely undermining sanctions there.
Too damn right. The bought-and-paid-for useful asset Johnson is visible, tangible, living proof of that.
Apart from everything else (and there is a HUGE amount of stuff to be apart from there) he refused to publish the Intelligence and Security Committee Russia report before the 2019 election. And has done the square root of FA about it since it was published in 2020.
Plus what @gracchus said upthread about not calling it appeasement when Tories took the money for their own political ends.
Also, the NATO result possibly emanates in part at least from Zelensky’s ongoing demands for a NATO-enforced no-fly zone being ignored. (It would risk an all-out nuclear war, which, however dire Ukraine’s situation is, I suspect many Ukrainians would not want, either.)
I wonder if the Ukrainian government is deliberately aiming to unlock miserly crypto bro wealth. Then again, they’ve probably bought into the hype about how cryptocurrencies and the blockchain will solve everything (including corruption and sclerotic Soviet-style bureaucracy).
I suspect it’s the former. Zelensky is very good at giving platitudes to people he doesn’t agree with while not actually committing to anything if he needs something from them
A mother and daughter who fled the war in Ukraine have said they were turned away from the UK border as they tried to reach friends in Wales.
Alena Semenova, 22, and Tetyana Tsybanyuk, 40, from Kyiv, escaped the conflict and drove over 1,500 miles to a ferry port in Calais only to be told they could not make the crossing without a visa.
The two women have been offered sanctuary with Ms Semenova’s godparents Graham and Alla Blackledge, who live in Glasbury-on-Wye, near Brecon.
But when they told officials they were refugees and were seeking asylum in Britain, the border guard they were talking to is said merely to have shrugged.
Sure, being bigger we’ll take some of the 1.4 million Ukrainian refugees in Poland right now. And add them to the 1.5 million other non-Ukrainans we already shelter. Though the UK certainly has stepped up, like 300 new visas.
I’m one of those people, my Grandfather was half-Polish, half Ukrainian. The area I grew up in (Brantford, ON) has both a large Mohawk population (due to the nearby Six Nations reserve), and a large settlement of Ukranian diaspora. This is indeed how I came to be!
I know this is a sensitive issue, and tangential at best to the current war, but I have to make the point that rebuilding the Frauenkirche, in my opinion, was a fundamental historical error.
This scar in Dresden’s centre was a very visible reminder of what happens if citizens actively support a murderous, criminal, warmongering, racist, jingoistic, inhumane government.
Many, many people obviously were moved, and donated to the cause. I doubt their motifs. I find it telling to see that, in comparison, and to the best of my knowledge, only 16 of the destroyed Synagogues were rebuild until now.
I, for one, would have preferred for the Frauenkirche to be preserved and remembered in a very different way.
When Ukraine is rebuilding what was destroyed, they will have to make choices as well. But I think we all very much agree that they are not the ones who brought this destruction onto themselves, in any understandable way.
