Come Back Alive - delivered the first deep-strike drones https://savelife.in.ua/en/
Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation - bought the famous spy satellite https://prytulafoundation.org/en
KOLO Charity Foundation - run by the Ukrainian tech community https://www.koloua.com/en/
Razom - US-based foundation https://www.razomforukraine.org/donate/
Canada-Ukraine Foundation - Canadian NGO, organizes winter aid for civilians https://www.cufoundation.ca/
Ukrainian World Congress https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/
Exen - Polish volunteer who delivers used vehicles to the front https://pomagam.pl/4x4dlaukrainy
United24 - the government fund https://u24.gov.ua/
Blue/Yellow - Lithuanian NGO supplying the Ukrainian military https://blue-yellow.lt/en/
Stopify - Latvian initiative, donations collected via Ziedot.lv https://stopify.org.ua/
Weapons to Ukraine - Czech initiative https://weaponstoukraine.com/en
Help99 - from Estonia's LIFT99 startup hub, convoys refitted trucks and drones to the front https://www.help99.co/donate
Aktion Deutschland Hilft - German humanitarian aid https://www.aktion-deutschland-hilft.de/
Thanks to everyone who suggested additions. Please keep adding foundations from your country in the comments.
Since the very start, they already raised over €121 million.
And this group: https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/
Also, Czech initiative https://weaponstoukraine.com/en and 69th Sniffing Brigade https://www.help99.co/donate is doing awesome work.
Glory to the Heroes!
inb4: yes, I'm too scared to do it myself, thanks for asking, the person in the mirror reminds me of that every day.
at this point the article 5 could be in circulation even without Ukraine being mentioned..
Irenology is the real cure for all of this though. political action or inaction will never bring, build, foster or protect peace because it is all rooted in polemology.
Otherwise it’s just going to war.
Edit: thanks for answers, this helps.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_emigration_during_the_...
(This is incomplete, I think there is a fourth or a fifth wave, probably since about summer 2026.)
This war won't be over until the Russian army starts conscription in Moscow. The Czar will happily empty out the villages in Siberia and the Caucasus.
Within the narrow scope of this discussion, yes. Ukraine would have a harder time hitting data centers around Moscow if they didn’t share a land border.
What Russia is doing in Ukraine is closer to America in Vietnam or Israel in Gaza than anything even Trump has done recently. And I doubt you’ll find many on this forum defending even the latter.
Out of these four, at least Syria is better off. Everything, literally everything is better than what the Assad regime was. The gruesomeness of Assad and his regime is on a level not seen since 1945.
Afghanistan was an utter failure of all of Western societies. Yes, we provided a generation worth of women with access to schools. But we never provided a way for Afghanistan as a country to stand on its own feet, instead we looked away while one half of the military didn't exist on paper and the other half raped children for funsies (look up "bacha bazi").
Libya... now that is mostly upon us Europeans. Ghaddafi, I'm glad this prick is gone, but again we didn't do anything to meaningfully help Libya grow, and by the time Putin began supporting oppositional warlords, the game was lost.
And Iran... oh dear god what a mess, dating back to the history of the US using Kurds for their aims and then letting them to die without support. This entire shitshow was a disaster from start to finish, even if the idea was noble - the Mullahs slaughtered tens of thousands of protestors the start of this year, it would have been incredibly unethical to just stand aside again.
It certainly does not. There is a huge and growing [1] (albeit still below ‘22 peak) tech outsourcing industry there.
Plus, likely Europe’s most advanced defense-industrial base for drones and, increasingly, missiles of all kinds. Being on the right side of a war works wonders for morale.
[1] https://itcluster.lviv.ua/en/gradual-market-stabilization-wh...
yeah, hating papers is our national trait at this point, given Diia and stuff XD
So the talent has left, but not because they disagree with Putin actions.
> On the first anniversary of the invasion, rallies took place in the main cities where Russian exiles settled, including Tbilisi, Vilnius, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris and London, with turnout in the hundreds. In Yerevan, protesters burned a picture of Putin.
> In November 2024, at least a thousand people marched through central Berlin behind Navalnaya, Yashin and Kara-Murza, with parallel rallies in cities including Prague, Vilnius, Yerevan, Lisbon and San Francisco.
> Another Berlin march followed in 2025, after the third anniversary of the full-scale invasion.
And not just EU/US but moreso in other countries, where the migration wave was much bigger, eg Georgia and Armenia; after those protests many Russians were banned from entering Georgia after a visa run, yet others continued protesting anyway. Just google it for christ sake?
Also to me, as a Russian immigrant, protesting from another country doesn't make a lot of sense.
Anyway, at this point your comments in this thread are pure ragebait and not worth spending time replying to.
it really never was. apart from a few one-off examples they have nothing if interest and quality.
Maybe this would remind ordinary russians that killing innocent civilians every day in Kyiv is not good
Ordinary Russians think the war's bad too. Only difference is you and I can say that without getting 15 years in a (very harsh) prison.
Maybe Russians outside Russia.
Of course almost everyone thinks war is bad, but many seem to think it's justified - different thing.
There seem to be a wide support for the idea that Russia is threatened (economically and to an extent military) by the global West, and also that Ukraine is not entitled to be independent and also many of the official lies about the background.
Good lies have a nugget of truth in them, and this is the case also here.
Russia's economy is not growing (compared to EU, US), fertility rate is down, the revolution in Ukraine undermines the stability of the Russian regime, the attempted coup in Belarus was also a threat, NATO is arguably expanding - lately as a reaction to the war but nonetheless, EU is expanding into post-Soviet states both offering membership but also trade agreements which undercut Russia's ambition to be an economical hub in the region, etc.
War affects an ordinary Russian in very negative ways: the possibility of conscription (w/ risk of injury/death), complications for travel, sanctions on goods and services, and the economic opportunity cost (money wasted on war that could have gone to productive uses, plus reduced economic output due to drone strikes on yandex, wildberries, refineries).
That's just not compatible with ambitions of its corrupt leaders who want to be a root-level player, not "one of NATO countries". And I'm not sure how legitimate is prioritization of wants of corrupt leaders over well-being of your compatriots.
tl;dr Other parties are Putin-like, and if/when a genuine alternative emerges, Putin deals with them ruthlessly. Example: Navalny was the charismatic leader of a small but popular rival party with anti-corruption policies. He was initially delegitimised (not allowed to partake in the 2018 elections due to [likely fake] charges of embezzlement), then poisoned (nearly died), then imprisoned, and then killed while in prison.
Consider the terrifying message that sends to would-be political rivals...
Estimate range is big because lots of civilians died in cities that ended up occupied.
[1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/10/06/i-m-used-to-walking-...
"innocent civilians every day in Kyiv is not good".
Estimations for how many civilians Russians killed in Chechnya range from 45,000 to 80,000.
Does not sound like looking for a source, but I'm not a native speaker.
From the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 to December 2025, 14,999 Ukrainian civilians were killed and 40,601 injured, according to the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU).
Russia could stop this invasion any time and not a single Russian would be hurt. Pure Kreml propaganda on HN, how sad.
Are we looking at the same thing? Was it deleted somewhere?
2) The UN estimate is considered on the low end because it looks into confirmed deaths while many civilians were killed in cities that became occupied and we have no numbers from there.
Since Mariupol fell to Russia, they never counted the dead. There are horror stories of the bodies not being buried for month after surrender, and in some cases, Russians simply pawed over the places with many dead (a prominent example is the theater in the city center, but there were more).
The numbers you are quoting are the "counted" ones. Mariupol, Sieverodonetsk, Kherson, saw a lot of deaths that were never counted.
Sorry to bring another conflict into the picture, but it's useful to illustrate the point. In Gaza, the "health ministry" used a different "technique" to count the dead. Normally, to establish that someone died, there has to be a qualified medical professional at the scene, they also have to get a hold of identifying documents (or else, they will be counted as "John/Jane Doe", but in the morgue, much later). In some "special" cases a non-medical professional may record a death (they are usually defined using the language like "the head is more than 50 cm away from the rest of the body" etc.) But they switched to "incorporating reports from the news sources" (i.e. if some newspaper reported X people killed in some event, they just added X to the tally).
After the front line stabilized in Ukraine, they had no reason (or excuse) to count their civilian casualties in the way Gaza administration did, so, they never incorporated those who were never properly reported. And that's why we have a relatively "low" numbers. If Ukraine is ever able to regain control of the territory captured after 2022, these numbers are bound to go much, much higher, as they will have to deal with eg. property ownership and would have to either declare the previous owners as deceased, or actually find them.
Why is my comment downvoted? (Rhetorical question, of course, I know what you are.) It is the reality that Russian civilians are killed daily by the Ukranian drones, guided also by your starlink satellites.
You may not like to hear this, but this is how things are.
Slava Ukraini!
The audacity of those bots these days.
The problem is that you and your likes are actively obstructing an objective description of how things are.
This includes, but is not limited to: the causes of war, what you might call "ukranian nationalism", but there is a better word for it, Russian civilian victims, and a lotof other things which I would name were it not for the american peculiar ideas about "free speech", which means that this comment will have a very short life (if at all).
Simple, Putin talked about this for decades, you can read about it:
The goal is the re-establishment of the Russian empire in it's largest borders, beginning with his massacres in Chechnya and the invasion of Georgia.
A bit like some of the conscripted Ruzzian orcs, eh?
Your weapons are murdering Russian civilians right now, but you don't care, why?
There is a whole lot of Ukranian war crimes by now, but you don't care, why?
Russia settled Russians in Ukraine to destroy it for decades. Then Russia instigated a civil war in Ukraine and finally invaded Ukraine in 2014, of course there were fights in Donbass then.
Don't forget Russia shot down a Malaysian plane in 2014 from Donbass.
"Your weapons are murdering Russian civilians right now, but you don't care, why?"
Because those Russian civilians voted and supported a dictator who wanted and wants to invade Europe and re-enslave the population. And Russians loved it, they loved it plundering and murdering and torturing people in Europe before and they will again.
Russia invaded Europe in 1939 in a joint military operation with the Nazis/Germans and will do so again whenever Russians see the chance to do so.
I would prefer no war but a big wall, miles deep minefields and drone/ballistic/SDI defenses instead to keep Russians from invading Europe again, but I guess Russia needs to first lose this war to make this a reality.
Looks like Ukrainians don't believe in "turn to him the other cheek".
The question why people who do not agree with the government should also pay the price for a war started by their government/country is not specific to this war.
The beautiful thing about US war is that it never gets back home. The moment it starts, the populance starts pulling back support. But if you are shooting random people in the desert and middletown nowhere's McDonald's are functioning, its all gravy.
Have you checked the diesel prices?
Makes me wonder how much compute is already being built in bunkers under mountains.
Not worth paying 100x for the bunker to save 1x worth of computer stuff.
So you build your stuff inside a mountain and run a bunch of big ass liquid cooling loops to heat exchangers in the atmosphere outside the mountain. The requirement of the cooling system being out in the open air means it can also be hit by air strikes, an adversary doesn't need to penetrate the mountain, just take out its cooling.
You'd have to build a fully underground cooling system that goes to a nearby river (or huge lake) and use the cold water from that, which would get costly quick.
Helsinki gets its water from the 120 km Päijänne Water Tunnel, which cost €200-250 million (adjusted for inflation) to build. Peak flow is 10 m^3/s by gravity alone and up to 20 m^3/s with pumps, which should be enough to cool a 1 GW data center. You could increase the cost by 2x (because real wages have gone up), by another 2x (because middlemen have destroyed productivity), and by yet another 2x (because everything is more expensive in America), and it would still be pretty reasonable.
Edit: I guess the scale isn't comparable to a, for example, Google data center though.
[1] https://www.ironmountain.com/data-centers/colocation/our-dat...
[2] https://betterbuildingssolutioncenter.energy.gov/showcase-pr...
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=london+un...
You could probably drill sideways into rocks and pump heat into the mountain for a certain period of time, but on a multi-month or year time scale, it would catch up with you after you had saturated it.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/build-design/safer-under...
It's a severe engineering challenge to hide massive heat exchangers on the scale of the datacenters built in the industrial area near Dulles (coordinate example: 38.9817915,-77.417775). Find those on a map and observe the scale of their cooling and generator systems and then try to find anything comparable that's been built underground.
edit: 61.9340107, 5.5084207 are the coordinates
Just wanted to make the point you don’t have to pay to excavate the cave :)
There are mines with plenty of space in them, and heat removal can be done with water cooling. But who is going to pay 50% more for that when it isn't needed 99.99% of the time?
Huh? The ones I know of have plenty of connectivity. The real issue is your first, that people prefer to just put their stuff in two countries over paying premium for having their servers under ground.
Although I personally would expect some sort of decentralisation option to be more effective. It's difficult to even theorise because we don't know exactly what sort of damage these strikes are doing and what countermeasures are already in place. If this strike has caught Yandex by surprise after almost 5 years of hot war then they really should hire a dude to check up on current events every so often. They must have some sort of contingency planning around a Ukrainian strike.
But yeah, the economic incentives are creating unicorns and centralizing compute/capital/etc.
https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraine-hits-russia...
You could potentially bury them in the ground, assuming you don’t use a generator for backup power. To my knowledge, this is not done today except in urban areas where an underground vault is used for power and comms.
https://www.decommsystems.com/resources/what-goes-into-an-il...
The reason why Ukraine, Russia and Iran are targeting data-centers is because they are easy targets with a lot of expensive equipment, but they don't really impact the military operation. So, they aren't high priority targets. Bomber airplanes, air defenses, launchers for ballistic missiles, command centers, factories manufacturing strategic military equipment, telecommunications, energy infrastructure would be the examples of high priority targets. The data-centers are more of a "we have excess drones, why not use them?"
I find it hard to believe that the military will intentionally use civilian data-centers for its own purposes. At least, not for the core of its operations (for auxiliary functionality: maybe). Military data-centers are likely to be in protected locations, perhaps using different h/w that addresses the cooling problem.
Also, it's a bit myopic to think that AI is having such a universal and large impact on society. Jobs that provide essential goods and services are, by and large, unaffected by AI. Farmers, construction workers, cooks etc. don't really use any of the AI stuff on the day to day basis, if at all.
Also Yandex is a large cloud provider, they host a lot of government-connected companies.
Ukraine has a very targeted response but notably tries to minimise civilian casualties
Perhaps an economic justification can be found for placing something so far up the gravity well that its adversaries can no longer physically approach it. Distributing the resource across many satellites would further confound any attack.
Increasing the cost of effect on a single target from $1,000 to $1,000,000,000 makes a difference. Especially when that 2nd option is likely to trigger additional multilateral strategic responses. If the only way to delete your adversaries data centers is with things like nuclear weapons, lasers and multi-stage rocketry, your adversary may have already won the game.
Welding lasers are pretty cheap, the two hard parts are a big enough apperture to focus 500 km away, and adaptive optics, both of which have already been demonstrated decades ago in astronomy.
I'm not saying Iran and North Korea already have such capabilities, but I am saying I think neither would have trouble building it six months ago if they'd wanted to.
The active thermal control system (ATCS) on the ISS uses an ammonia loop and radiators measuring 13.6 x 3.12 meters, or about 42.5 square meters. It can dissipate 16 kW, which is enough for 16 H200s, or one-quarter of a rack on Earth. For 200 kW, you would need a system 12.5 times larger, about 531 square meters—2.6 times larger than the solar array. The satellite would be enormous, larger than the ISS, and all of that for only three racks.
https://codedtrip.com/en/blog/data-centers-in-space-disastro...
Starlink gen 3 satellite is designed to dissipate 250 kW. You are talking about an already solved issue, with real hardware already being built today.
Perhaps, but the parent comment posited that some people would pay the premium for orbital data center due to much better security. At $200 per kg to orbit, it could make sense.
It's not that hard, Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100 MW of heat, split over many satellites. Any orbital datacenter would use similarly distributed satellites.
>Internet Connectivity for AS200350 (YandexCloud)
https://ioda.inetintel.cc.gatech.edu/asn/200350?from=1791331...
Or will we see civilian datacenters with their own defensive drone swarms, and a couple of phalanx-style point defence systems for good measure?
As the market goes, so goes the multiple being granted to SPCX. That is, when the AI bubble contracts on the multiples being granted, SPCX will decline dramatically. In my observation HN typically widely can't differentiate properly between the real AI economy being developed and the multiples being temporarily granted in the stock market, it's common on here that people think they're the same thing ('when the AI bubble ends'). Back in reality what is going to happen is an implosion of the multiples when the growth slows (or suddenly stops due to an economic shock), and despite that the AI economy broadly will radically expand regardless over 10, 20, 30 years. See: the Internet build out (and market valuations), it will occur much the same conceptually.
He is on his way to become the first ($100 trillion) supervillain. Until 2 years ago, he stood at the center of most of the good news, then he got a few calls from Putin and he became unhinged from our (obscured) point of view. Nowadays he's a dark pattern.
Capitalism culminates in him, and he has to decide what to make of the world. He is our de-facto king, while on a personal level he has to decide what to do with his fortune. Put it into smart contracts for an AI to use and rule the world? Giving it to his kids would be underwhelming, not what he lived for.
People joked that mankind existed to bring forth the machines and would then become superfluous. The irony of it. Well, it seems irony has mr Musk. He sees the petty online bickering and he sees himself as alone, as the only adult in the room, who has to decide the fate of humanity, and his power in many domains puts him to the task.
He has his fiduciary responsibility that puts the interests of his share-holders first. He sees that as a healthy check on his power. At the end of all his calculations he has responsibilities akin to the Star Wars Emperor. Just like many white men, who come spend the remainder of their days in function and in defense of their property. Not in defense of life.
So Musk needs his antagonist to arrive on the scene, so he can repurpose his empire for the good the antagonist brings, as he represents a complete overhaul of the way life is lived. So the jury is out on mr Musk, and may he always remember his status as an American is just a hustle gone wild. Similar to the dynamic of how a liar has to keep extending his web of lies. He will make it into a machine that will carry his burden going forward. And then what? When, if ever, will he remember he is an African, and a friend of his own antagonist? His final words may sound like: Luke, I am your Father!
It's not that it can't be done at all, but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy.
Musk is a textbook narcissist. His consistent pattern is to make grandiose promises - literal future faking - fulfil a small percentage of them, then make even bigger and more grandiose promises and hope investors have a short memory. (They do.)
As a narcissist his primary relationship orientation is contempt for others. He's more interested in damaging projects he doesn't like - like the left-leaning community on the original Twitter, using promises of Hyperloop to kill high speed rail, ignoring the CSA from Grok, and of course the USAid fiasco - than seeing through the projects he claims to be developing to completion.
He fits in perfectly with Thiel, Altman, and the rest. The tech is sometimes interesting, but the alignment is fundamentally hostile to the rest of humanity.
Different problem.
Cooling can be done in space, it's a normal problem; not easy, nothing in space is easy, but on the scale of space it is normal.
However, at the temperature you would run a chip at, a radiator you make for space will just work better, reject more heat, if you leave it on the ground.
We get convective cooling down here as well as radiative. At operational temperature, convection more than makes up for the atmosphere being a heat bath at ~20 C or whatever.
You are overstating the engineering difficulty. Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100MW.
He may have been a wrong'un before that, but he was definitely already doing a confidence trick by that point.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-yandex-says-sec...
Example quote from Azure documentation:
> Azure Government is used by the US Department of Defense (DoD) entities to deploy a broad range of workloads and solutions.
Calling such a DC a civilian target is essentialy incorrect now, and has been for years.
its also important to understand that government isnt non civilian, in this context its non military
I didn't misinterpret, you are using incorrect terminology.
Can we use it to judge which accounts were bots?
First, a long-running SEAD / DEAD campaign by Ukraine last year and early this which thinned Russian air defence throughout occupied territories and left Russia with difficult deployment decisions for what remained.
Second, improvements to drones (speed and EW resistance) and expanded production - meaning the air defence can be saturated.
Third, Russia's vast geography itself, leaving countless approaches to targets impossible to defend.
A mystery really...
Yandex: > 99 % https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/as13238
Scaleway: 90 % https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/as12876
Google ASN is at 98.7% https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/as15169
It could be malicious, but that exact stat doesn't show that.
Implication was that tons of malicious traffic originate from there. I pointed out that bot % stat doesn't seem to be useful for determining that, Occam's razor and all.
People on X comment on the noticeable drop in bot comments.
Great will be when all huge data center are visited by free range unknown drones, like what happened to the Wildberries.
I'm also surprised that people can't see this simple solution to the situation.
Destroying heating units in Ukraine also affects innocent users in much worse ways than losing a datacenter.
The vast majority of Russians loved the war mostly because they made lots of money from it. Just when Ukraine started hitting oil infra people no longer liked the war. I am sorry for those 10% of Russians who didn't want the war and can't move abroad.
20% of Russians were ready to vote for an anti-war party in the last elections before it was illegally removed from the ballots, and many more don't support the war. The people who do are mostly old or live in small towns with no access to education. I doubt many of them are Yandex Cloud users.
I assume - one would need to check - that the majority of people who left Russia after 2022 did not support the war, so those left should be on the lower end.
"20% of Russians were ready to vote for an anti-war party in the last elections"
Yes, as I've said, approval dropped when Ukraine hit oil infra and gas prices went up, I can see 20% as a number. Nevertheless as show by approval ratings after 2014, that number was lower until people got hit by the impact of the war themselves.
[Edit] People didn't keep that money but spent it so others profited from that money too.
This is what happens in wars - beside war racketeers - salaries go up. There is a lot of research on how German profited from WW2 (and before) for example for most of the war. WW2 too seems most researched from what I see on how everyone profits until things get worse and end.
This is impossible, even in a dictatorship.
The starvation years of the DPRK in the mid 1990s directly after the collapse of the Soviet Union might be the closest that such a state has come to the situation getting so dire that the people could have theoretically risen up, no matter the consequences, but for a myriad of reasons the North Koreans were unable to.
Same random people who works and support military machine with money and labor.
The more damage Ukraine does to them the better. Maybe then these Russians who allegedly don't like Putin will get their shit together and do something about him. He's their responsibility. They are, like it or not, supporting his war simply by existing in the Russian economy. If the entire country really wanted him gone they could get him gone.
Interesting take. Last I checked, those datacenters hosted software that targeted a children's school.
I guess for some definition of "innocent".
If - I assume there is - there is a post shared on HN about Israel and Gaza we can discuss that genocide there.
(1) 89% of Russians approved Putin and the 2014 Crimean invasion
According to Putin.
Lewada, the pollster which got sacked later as a "foreign agent", got 86%
I hope that Putin will not attack again the electricity and power in Ukraine , hopefully the retard is scared now that Ukraine will bring the cold to the Moscowites and I am not happy for the children in Moscow to suffer because of the adults not giving a shit about the criminal they elected.
And I'm sure these data centers were also used for military purposes, no way they weren't in the current russian environment.
The general decency of condemning any/all types destruction won't apply here.
The severity of the attacks on Russian borders have I believe still a limited effect on the course of the war, but I suppose it certainly won't hurt Ukraine's chances to in some form survive this war.
My dude, it’s one of the most heavily censored search engines on earth