Left to their own devices on the first day of a most asymmetrical war against the all-powerful Russian army, the Ukrainians, released by NATO, threw themselves headlong into a battle where resourcefulness and inventiveness were proven to be their best weapons to date.
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Read alsoIn Kiev, the Ukrainian army resists the Russian assaults
One of the best examples is undoubtedly the Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who for several days has been multiplying requests to private companies, individuals and civilians throughout the world, and has just had a nice success in convincing SpaceX boss Elon Musk to make the Starlink system available to Ukraine.
“While you are trying to colonize Mars, Russia is trying to occupy Ukraine!
If your rockets land successfully from space, Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civilians!
We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations
,” he wrote on Twitter on Saturday morning to challenge the American billionaire.
“Starlink service is now up and running. Other terminals are on the way”
, answered him on the social network the boss of Tesla in the evening.
Starlink is a low-orbit satellite Internet access system, which guarantees stable access to the web when ground facilities are damaged.
On Sunday, however, it was unclear how users in Ukraine had the ground capabilities to receive the service.
Internet access has been particularly affected in certain regions, particularly in the south and east of the country, due to the intense military activity taking place there.
Read alsoWar in Ukraine: the transformation of Zelensky into a warlord
The Ukrainian minister, in charge of the digital sector, also asked Tim Cook, the boss of Apple, to close his App Store in Russia, and to Microsoft to suspend its trade with this country, without answer for the moment.
He also appealed to YouTube, Google, PayPal, Netflix... asking his companies to suspend their activities in Russia.
Mykhailo Fedorov also launched a call on the Internet on Saturday to raise an army of cyberactivists and hackers around the world against Russia.
The international hacker network Anonymous has already claimed to have succeeded in hijacking the Russian television network in order to
"show what is really happening in Ukraine"
.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense has launched a hotline called "Come back alive from Ukraine", to allow the families of Russian soldiers to hear from their children or their husbands taken prisoner on the Ukrainian front, and their to speak.
According to The Kyiv Independent
newspaper
, she has already received thousands of calls.
The ministry also lists the names of Russian soldiers who died in combat, in order to inform their relatives back home.
It's about addressing the Russian people directly, as President Volodymyr Zelensky had in a video posted on social media, and touching hearts, showing a more human face than the enemy.
Read alsoWar in Ukraine: around the world, solidarity with Kiev is manifested in the street
The government agency Ukravtodor in charge of road maintenance has launched an appeal on social networks to ask Ukrainians to take down road signs in order to confuse the Russian troops.
Not without humour, she accompanies her campaign with a photo (retouched) of three direction signs on a roadside on which we can read, instead of city names: "Fuck you", "Go again fuck off”, and “Fuck you to Russia”.
With derisory means and sometimes the energy of despair, the Ukrainian people are firing on all cylinders to stop the advance of the Russian troops.
Video footage on social media showed civilians barricading their bodies, standing in front of columns of Russian armor to prevent them from crossing their village.
On social networks, the authorities appeal to the vigilance of Ukrainians, calling on them to report the presence of strangers in their neighborhood, who could be Russian “sabotage agents”.
Ordinary citizens learn how to handle weapons or make stocks of Molotov cocktails to throw at enemy armored vehicles.
If they do not win this war on the military ground, the Ukrainians will in any case have won the battle of world public opinion.
