Долінська Тетяна Tetiana Dolinska

“When the full-scale Russian war began against Ukraine, in the first days, we didn't know how it would end. We hoped for the best, but we had to preserve Ukraine in the internet space. For security reasons, I will not name the countries, but the main registry was already deployed there at that time ... there was already a backup. But it was not a combat registry. Preparatory work was done. And on the evening of the 25th or the morning of the 26th [of February 2022], the main registry was already located outside Ukraine. They helped us a lot to transfer all our critical resources, with critical information. They provided us with an entire rack of servers, with technology, with everything, in another country. We just agreed on cooperation and paid consulting services before the full-scale war. When it began, specialists from this country did everything for us for free. Although, just so you understand, what amounts we are talking about, this project, if we paid, we would have paid $300,000. When they talk about billions of aid, it's clear that thousands are not so significant. But for us, this is a very serious amount. An organization that manages the national domain also helped, but they didn't have enough hardware, servers. Providers in this country, who had new equipment in stock (not used ones, because logistics couldn't deliver everything in time), pooled their resources to quickly assemble the necessary equipment and provide assistance to us.”

“We had a long legal process where we were in a lawsuit with the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine. It was quite funny when we found out that Ukraine is a unique country where the domain market is not 100%, but 200%. This is because the Antimonopoly Committee decided that there are two so-called monopolists in the domain market, each of which has a 100% monopoly. These are “Hostmaster” and “Ukrainian Network Information Center”. There was a funny story going around that they have their own 100%. So, why are they trying to take our share?”

“ In the fall of 1999, the project “Elections” was implemented. These were the first electronic elections in Ukraine. Everyone went and filled out papers, voted, but there was another system. And this was the first time when the operators of territorial election commissions entered data in the program created by Ukrainian specialists-programmers, which they received from district election commissions. And this data on voting for each candidate was collected in a common database. And we knew about the election results before everyone else because we had access to this system. But before we participated in this project as specialists... because I was in the support service for operators of territorial election commissions, and we were tracking... We also had our own monitoring system... our guys wrote a monitoring system. And we saw on the screen who had already transmitted data, who had not yet transmitted data, who had partially transmitted data. Who had connection, who did not have connection. Because at that time there were many election commissions - it was still dial-up, it was a phone call, and not everywhere we had a normal telephone connection. For example, I remember we called Voznesensk, there was such a cool operator we had... or we called if we saw that his connection was lost, or he called back and asked, “Girls, do you see me, what does your system show there? Because, - he says, - I don't understand whether the data has been sent or not.” So we signed non-disclosure documents. We did not have the right then, except for those who were involved in this project, we could not even say anything extra on the phone, because it was a criminal responsibility for disclosure.”

“In the 11th grade, it was exactly in 1989, I was the Komsomol organizer of the school... We were sent to a camp of Komsomol organizers. It was in the fall, and it was interesting because everyone was studying, but I went away. And this gathering took place, an all-Ukrainian gathering in Tukhlia, not far from Lviv. I remember it well because they brought us to Lviv, but we couldn't see the city. They took us to the local Komsomol organization, and we sat there. They didn't even let us out on the street because they were afraid that something might happen to us. Because I studied in a Russian school and had a Russian-speaking family. That is, I studied Ukrainian, but I didn't speak it. I could write and speak, but it wasn't the language of everyday life. That's why they were afraid to let us out, so that nothing would happen to us. So I was in Lviv, but just passing. But it was interesting in Tukhlia because we had different intellectual games and exchanges of ideas. It was fun. We were there for about a week.”