Belarusian regime’s thugs shut down Imaguru, the country’s key startup hub
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Is that the kind of community you want to be part of? If so, please find a different one. If no, then please don't take HN threads further into political or nationalistic flamewar. It's shameful. It would count as violence too, if internet forums weren't such teapots.
No more of this, please—where by "this" I mean any vector pointing to that hellish reductio, not just the ones that actually get there. What to do instead: have thoughtful, curious conversation. If you can't have thoughtful, curious conversation, please don't post until you can.
The reason is simple: the regime cannot appropriate intellectual property. If the thugs come and put a hi-tech company under arrest, all they can "collect" is .. desktops and monitors. The real value — be that in code or in employees' heads — cannot be arrested, and the company can continue what they did under a different cover (or from a neighboring country).
The regime understands that too, so they took a somewhat laissez-faire attitude to hi-tech.
Belarusian (as well as Ukrainian etc.) EPAM are just outsourcing for the head office.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPAM_Systems
so just 2500 out of 41K people are in Belarus (while it is from where it all started).
it makes no sense for Lukashenka harassing EPAM. So you do it and they just move these 6% of heads to other country offices.
If you have a 2,500-strong manufacturing plant, the government can come and take over your plant. If you have a 2,500-strong bank, the government can come and take over your bank. If you have a 2,500-strong property-holding company, the government can come and take over your company and your properties.
But if you have a 2,500-strong software development center, the government cannot come and take over your software development center. And this is why software development centers strive in Belarus.
They take over your software company, and put you in jail.
Sure they do not get your IP, but you loose it.
I will hazard a guess that the software development centres striving in Belarus are very careful to stay entirely out of politics. Belarus is not a democracy.
But if you had a software company bringing $10M, and the government takes over your software company and puts everyone in jail, they now get nothing.
Moreover, where they had, say, $100k in taxes previously, they have $0 in taxes now.
What you describe is possible, e.g. out of spite, but it does not make any financial sense.
Everyone in Belarus is "very careful to stay entirely out of politics". Still banks and plants get appropriated. Software companies do not.
I manage about 40 engineers from EPAM. Before the troubles, 5 were in ukraine and one in Russia (but he was supposed to move to Minsk).
Now most of my team is working from Ukraine or Russia. A few choose to take on-site gigs in Netherlands and were replaced with more Belarussians in Ukraine. One of our team disappeared entirely, presumed to be in prison but our TAMs are downright cagey if we ever asked what happened to him.
EPAM is a good company, they saw the writing on the wall and hustles to get their people to safety.
Anyway -- you can help! Most of the communication, coordination and crime-documenting happens on Telegram and the regime tries to block access to this information. You can run Telegram Proxy [0][1]. The installation is fairly straightforward, mostly setup and forget. After setup you can register your proxy with MTProxybot [2], so that people can learn about/use your proxy. If you know people there, I also recommend setting up a private proxy just for them (i.e. not registering with [2]) and sharing over private communication channel (e.g. Signal), as the thugs try to block proxies, so it's a cat-and-mouse game.
Edit: Added info about MTProxybot.
[0] https://core.telegram.org/mtproto/mtproto-transports
Not "shitting where you eat" (never do something that is a crime in your own country) is basic opsec but the details are usually a lot more complex.
If you use such a proxy in a completely legal way, but that the dictator thinks might make him lose his power, then he can make up fake charges against you and put you in prison.
"In the summertime, in the Belarusian capital of Minsk, young couples rent boats. They float, seemingly aimlessly, with the current of the Svisloch River, until they find themselves under a bridge. Then they row against the current for as long as they can, hoping to find shelter from the sun and from prying eyes. The premise of Belarusian writer Victor Martinovich’s Russian-language novel Paranoia is that this is impossible. As a police state such as today’s Belarusian dictatorship approaches perfect control, someone is always watching. The young lovers are watching each other, whether they understand this or not. The only way to be safe in such a society is to abandon love, but true solitude courts paranoia."
[1] New York Review of Books, "Paranoia" Review: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/10/28/darkest-belarus/
[2] Non-paywalled version: https://archive.is/fTOcP#selection-647.0-651.318
Anyway, thanks for sharing.
It's also a matter of culture. For example, writing overly long sentences in passive voice in Russian is encouraged if not considered a mark of sophisticated writing whereas in English it's a massive faux-pas. Reading English I get the sense that meaning takes precedence over syntactic complexity. I can see why English might come off as, uhh, simple if one is used to bloated prose and reading between the lines. In math every word and sentence matters. I sense English strives for that as well.
Besides, English handles morphological complexity by way of syntax and massive semantic overloading of words.
Aside from logically vivid constructions and phrases, as a nonnonative speaker of English, I really like secondary/n-ary meaning to simple/common/"little" words that we are typically not taught as ESL (or EnglishAsNthLanguage). For example, I was delighted to discover "we made it" = "we are successful", "we made here on time" = "we got here on time", "we are making good time" = "we are traveling faster than expected" etc. I also love English constructions like "it's pretty ugly", "it's little too much" etc :) Basically, anything in English that doesn't have 1-1 equivalent in Slavic/Turkic languages immediately perks up my ears/eyes. Thankfully, there's a ton of that in English.
English has 3 grammatical cases, 12 tenses, and 1 gender (natural gender).
I speak Spanish and compared to Romance languages, English grammar is so much simpler ;)
Most likely that they have lives that have a lot of stuff happening in them besides consumption and education.
1. If you are from Belarus you can get "humanitarian visa" for 10 euro, that gives you one year of work permit with no strings attached and no job offer priori.
2. Still getting regular work visa is very easy for software.
3. Having any grandparent with Polish origin grants you equivalent of green card. Given history this is quite common and not so expensive to proof with right lawyer.
Prisoners of Geography is literally the name of the book determining this exact conclusion. Russia's history involves lots of invasions. (WW2 Germany, Mongols, etc.) Because of this, they want to secure the area around them geographically, whether by politically-aligned states or by controlling the territory themselves. West of Moscow is just huge plains, there's no defensible moat, so they think they need to secure all of the area until they geographically have a defensible moat for their army. That moat / natural barrier is the narrower choke-point on the left side of Poland, the Romanian mountains, Black Sea, and Baltic sea. That's also not-coincidentally what the USSR controlled. So Russia wants Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, Moldova, and even Poland. That's why you see even Poland under Russian influence operations, as another commenter pointed out.
What?
He was in prison in 2004-2006, but died in 2014.
From Wikipedia[1]:
> In March 2005, in Orsha prison, Marynich suffered a cerebral stroke. The stroke was provoked by the prison administration when Marynich was denied access to his medicines after a very hard transportation in unheated train wagons from Minsk to Orsha. [...] Marynich died on 17 October 2014, at the age of 74. His death was officially ruled a homicide, caused by the stroke he received in prison 9 years earlier.
But overall, I agree, his case looks unlawful and politically motivated, from what I can find in the public sources (the wikipedia and tut.by) - he was sentenced for stealing computers that US Embassy provided to his NGO, while US Department released a statement that they don't have any claims against him.
The Minsk site has some corporate tenants.
Opposition groups held some meetings in the space.
I'm sure this is why Belarus gov shut it down.
So far no-one is arrested, they simply denied to lease the office space. Hopefully it will stop at that.
Probably other IT people who joined the "Coordination Council" will face consequences too.
Let's see how many NGOs and US spies have been working to undermine Belarus sovereignty. Even in Syria American politicians accepted the fact that US supported directy terrorists who wanted to subvert Assad. IF Assad was a criminal but a good friend of the US interests, that would no problem. The US would not even bother. Not to mention of course, Ukraine, where right wing Nazi fascists are supported militarily by United states and Europe (all the US's vassal states speak the same language)
By the way, techcrunch is a mouthpiece of the US based interests. They did not notice that Lukashenko did not accept any "help" from IMF or the WHO besides having been pressured heavily. Opening up your country to IMF is like giving them your keys.
And sadly HN and Reddit are usually political echo chambers for geopolitics
So it's more beneficial to let the US be selfish than Russia.
I haven't heard this before, where are you getting this claim from?
The prime purpose of NATO is deterrence; no-one wants to be forced into a shooting war - hence I expect NATO to be very wary of accepting a member which may invoke article 5 pretty much the moment the accession ceremony is over.
The Ukraine would have a much easier time getting into NATO if relations with Russia were cordial; however, as the mere act of exercising their sovereignty to join an alliance of their choosing is sufficient to prevent cordial relations with Russia...
The problem, obviously, being that Russia is not content to be secure within its borders, but also desires to have a say in the affairs of neighbouring countries (Which, incidentally, makes these countries feel much less secure, hence making them more eager to join alliances to improve their lot, precisely the scenario Russia wishes to avoid.)
Sigh.
There is no point of deterrence when if Ukraine is gone, and you have Russian tanks in Vienna in one week, Munich the other, and the rest of Europe in a month.
Ukraine in comparison has a miserably weak military that is strongly outdated compared to Russia.
How much tanks does Germany have, and how much does Russia?
I will do Googling for you.
354 vs 12000
Russia's tank force biggest problem? Having more tanks than pilots.
Half of this tank fleet is in long term storage for this reason, and what's left half is in rather bad semi-written-off condition.
If we let Russians to regain their breathe, it would not take them long to restore them, and regain this enormous military asset.
Russia only has 3000 tanks in service. The rest are mothballed. That's not half, that's 75+%.
Even looking in total, the vast majority of these "12 000" tanks are in fact T-72s, 9000 of them. We already know how T-72s fare against modern tanks.
For sure, 3000 decent MBTs is a formidable force. But 3000 vs 1000 is not going to let Russia steamroll when their air force is set-up for defence and not offense. Even an advantage of 3:1 is not going to do you much good when your opponent has absolute air supremacy.
A Russian offensive into Western Europe will definitely get stalled, there is no question about it.
If relations with Russia were cordial, the Ukraine would have no need to get into NATO to begin with. In that ideal world, things would look different; we don't live in that world, sadly.
This is the case in Ukraine right now and in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Russia is unwilling, right now, to challenge all of Ukrainian airspace, and Armenia/Russia was unwilling to challenge Azerbaijani airspace.
The moment this change is when the drone strategy is no longer effective. Drones only work when you have air supremacy over at least a staging area. When you do not, then there is not much to do.
Also, Russia has it's own drones, which they are not using because they are in the defensive position right now.
If there is a prompt for a Russian advancement or if the line becomes untenable, the drone-based strategies will collapse and the conflict will turn unless Ukraine can muster up something else. Simply put, Ukraine has no hope at all of contesting air supremacy with Russia. It's air force is incomparably worse, and drones have no anti-air capacity.
But we are not there. Russia is nowhere near attempting a full-scale invasion and hasn't, they limited themselves to taking the Donbass and Crimea and defending it strictly, more or less.
As for Russia in Armenia, there was not really any cake-on-the-face. Russia's policy was to stand-by unless Azerbaijan was threatening Armenia proper. Maybe Armenia could have negotiated another arrangement had their orientation been different, but as it stood Russia was unwilling to do much at all in the NK conflict.
As it stands the balance of power is still overwhelmingly in the favor of Russia and it is not close.
What's going to happen is that Russia will slice Ukraine at the Dnieper River and also take all of Ukraine's Black Sea territory. That will include taking Odsesa and Kharkiv. By taking the territory south of Odesa, they'll get a large border with Moldova, and then they'll annex Moldova at some point or otherwise entirely control it as a puppet.
There is no scenario where this doesn't happen. When Putin took Crimea, taking the rest of Ukraine's coastal waters was an obvious and inevitable step. The only thing left is timing, whenever Putin decides an ideal time to do it is.
There's nothing the West can do to Russia at this point to stop any of this and Putin knows that. No nation in the West is going to war with Russia over these lands.
Turkey never fought Russia in Syria. They fought Assad's government with some help from Russian irregulars, even then they got stalled and recently had losses. Russia was however unwilling to escalate and there were no air battles, for example.
that is the key point. Turkey mastered how to use drones to kill Pantsir-S1 in Syria, and immediately applied that in Libya and Azerbaijan with great success. Pantsir-S1 - the first were brought to Donbass in August 2014 with the tank battalions which hit near Ilovaysk - is what caused Ukraine to stop using air force in Donbass. With Pantsir-S1 advantage removed, the tank-based Russian forces there would become much easy to deal with for Ukrainian air force and especially for the high-precision munition what is used from the Turkish drones.
>modern jets
Russia is really far from sending airforce there, while Ukraine doesn't have much barriers for allowing the F-16 to fight there - as result the F-16s will appear there earlier thus putting Russia in the position of the one escalating conflict if Russia decides to bring the airforce. And if Russia does decide to send the planes in the outcome is far from obvious- while F-16 is older and worse in direct dogfight than the modern Russian planes it isn't that important as for the last 40 years USSR/Russian planes were mostly shot down from stand-off distance where NATO weaponry and situation awareness is better.
Ukraine has to modernize army (including anti-air), stabilize economy (around 3% year to year growth prior to COVID). With each year more and more people understand that Russia is, unite against aggressor. It forces our government to implement much needed reforms. Meanwhile Russia economy is crumbling. All we need is time.
Unfortunately question today is not about deoccupation, but about preserving our freedom and sovereignty.
Pantsir is not even an IADS. It is at its core 50 year old technology. S300 and S400 are fundamentally different and an order of magnitude more dangerous, they are real air defence systems.
The F-16 would have no situational awareness advantage. It would be without any AWACS and the Russian jets would be networked into the S400 system and sharing data. They would have the clear and obvious situational awareness advantage.
And this is only if Turkey is willing to fight the Russian airforce. So far even in Syria Turkey has not dated to do so, there is no chance Turkey will dare to do so that close to Russia.
it is a very effective system against 4th gen at the close range. As a result one has to use high-precision stand-off weapons in the presence of Pantsir . Ukraine doesn't have such weapons, and this is why Russian tanks operated so freely there. Turkey does have it and is using those weapons from the drones - that is how they have been so effectively taking out Pantsirs and Russian made armor in all those places recently.
Russia isn't going to deploy S-300/400 class of the systems in Donbass. There is pretty specific parameter envelope for fighting there without escalating it to the next level. Neither side has interest in doing so, at least currently. That also basically makes Russian jets non-participants there.
>there is no chance Turkey will dare to do so that close to Russia.
That is the point here that Ukraine is that chance for Turkey to get that close without officially fighting Russia, only supposedly helping Ukraine on its official territory like they did in Azerbaijan (and like Russia did in Syria - right near the Turkey btw, and, similar to Russia in Syria, Turkey can bring a lot into Ukraine, including AWACS - i think it is Ukrainians who may be not ready for that level of Turkish involvement - i mean for example my great-grandfather, a peasant from Kiev region, fought in the Russo-Ottoman war just 144 years ago and the historic memory of Ottoman rule and power projection in the Black Sea region is still alive). It isn't an open frontal war, it is more like a power- and kind of chess pieces moving play. No country wants to be slotted into a very disadvantageous position of an open aggressor - thus officially there is no Russia in Donbass and this is why it can't send S-300/400 there - and the play is to move as far and as aggressively as possible without being slotted that way.
>And this is only if Turkey is willing to fight the Russian airforce. So far even in Syria Turkey has not dated to do so
actually Turkey did it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Russian_Sukhoi_Su-24_shoo... . It was pretty clear demonstration of force. Russia didn't dare to respond in kind - that would be a major escalation Russia couldn't sustain as among other factors the number of Russian planes in Syria, and especially modern planes capable of dealing with F-16s, is miniscule.
Joe Biden (78) just replaced Donald Trump (74). Prince Phillip died at the age of 99. Putin has a long way to go on natural lifespan.
https://www.levada.ru/en/ratings/
41% of Americans disapprove of Biden, according to this:
Russian thinking is wholly totalitarian, in the good old Hitleresque sense (while ofc, Russian state is absolutely NOT totalitarian, it's just a soft dictatorship not unlike vast majority of governments in the poor world). Totalitarian thinking means that Putin is "us", i.e. government, State overall, country, nation, and society are the same, they are inseparable: most Russians could not explain how is "society" is different from "state", or discard the whole concept of "society" as Western weed. Rejecting Putin thus means self-rejecting. Very few people can even think of it.
Of course, then you have zombie regimes holding to power forever, because people who would challenge them most effectively are outside the country. Iran, Russia etc.
Navalny returned to Russia precisely because he did not want to be seen as yet another emigree who utters advice from abroad. He will pay with his life for that courage and other people will think twice before becoming the next anti-regime icons.
Authoritarian states are very good at intimidating people. What they cannot usually control is the economy, that is a major weakness in their armor. That is one of the reason why China concentrates so much on economic development.
If they get killed, then no. The dead don't win elections, even rigged ones.
Do you realize that if everyone reasoned like you, then there would be no elections anywhere but instead every country would still be monarchies?
KGB office in Minsk was always quite big and powerful in Soviet times.
Fun fact 1: head of FSB Patrushev studied in that academy.
Fun fact 2: Lee Harvey Oswald lived in Minsk under KGB control for a few years.
This isn't specific to Belarus, only the local details (democracy, Russia etc) differentiate it from say Hong Kong or brexit Britian really.