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Annons
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David Arakhania: I’m just an IT guy. When the conflict with Russia really blew up two and half months ago, I visited the new Crimean border with friends. I was shocked. They didn’t have any essentials and were ashamed at how poorly equipped they were, so we came back home and started to think how we could help them. I spent £5,800 [€7,300] of my own money to buy 200 pairs of tactical glasses to protect their eyes. But that was just a start. As we’re IT guys, we obviously know about Kickstarter and online fundraising, so thought, 'Why not create a Kickstarter for the army?' We quickly made the website, and within two weeks we raised more than £58,000 [€73,000] for equipment for those guys on the border. We bought everything they needed to serve the country efficiently.And making a drone was the next obvious move.
Yes – all the modern armies have them. As a country we aren’t prepared to have Russia as an enemy. We have the longest unprotected border in Europe – more than 750km – over which the Russians are constantly passing lots of things to support the terrorists [Russia has denied providing weapons or soldiers]. The best way to protect from that is to have drones flying all along the border and analysing any movement.
Annons
No, they won’t allow us to film the drone or take pictures. The picture circulating on the web is not the real drone – it’s much bigger, much more powerful than that. It must be kept secret, because pictures would obviously help the enemy. However, next week we'll have videos from the drone that we'll have permission to publish.And now you’re funding another drone.
Yes, we’re currently building a plane drone. The first one was a helicopter. Once we’ve built these two we have approval from the Ministry of Defence to finance mass production of the drones. We need around 55 in total.
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Just regular Ukrainian people. We were stupid enough to have the site in Ukrainian, but we're in the process of changing it to support English language versions, which will encourage donations in other countries.Have you had much opposition to the project?
Yes. Russians are being paid to try to destroy our image online by commenting on anything we upload. I have a couple of connections who tell me for sure that the IT companies are being paid £1.75 per comment. Each one will say that Ukraine is bad, the new power is not legal and so on. They're doing this on mostly English-language sites, such as the Guardian.
Annons
We’re preparing a new project called Aerospace. We needed something cheaper than the first drone, as we’re still on a limited budget and need to equip as many posts as possible. It’s a big balloon equipped with the old cameras, but not wireless. It’s connected via wire to the top of the post, which makes it like an observation tower. It will be about 300 metres high and will observe 360 degrees from the post. The budget for these will be less than £580 [€730], so we hope to raise enough money to equip every block post. Right now, there are about 100 posts in total along the border.
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Absolutely. It’s funny, because this revolution started because the president didn’t sign the association agreement. When we finally signed it recently it was merely a regular news event – everyone is focused on the war right now. So we’ve stepped backwards, as the priorities are now different.Finally, where do you see The People’s Project in a year’s time, if the war is still ongoing?
Firstly, to expand into other areas and accept other projects from volunteers. We’re trying to bring all the initiatives into one place so that a potential donor can decide whether to fund a drone, or a life vest for a soldier, or a helmet, or food and so on.
Annons