that would be https://www.patreon.com/savelife_in_ua

(Ukrainian IT community already raised around $100k in a last few days)

How do I know that this money is going to where they say it is going? I'm happy to support it at the top level, I just want to make sure I'm not accidentally funnelling money into Russia's disinformation campaign.

Savelife service continuously publishes financial reports for all their activity. You can find that on their website. (We know that it's not user-friendly especially for English speaking users, updates will be soon). For example, this one is an income and expenses report for 2021-2022 years [1].

[1] - https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?resid=B0264747CBB7E393!1...

Indeed, some external validation would be great, from Patreon or any other organization.

The membership levels are also.. Disturbing? If I select "Projectile" membership (with a picture of a grenade missile or something) it says "You started saving lives!". All memberships are munition for weapons ("Bullet", "Projectile", "Bomb" and "Missile"), not exactly something you associate with "Saving lives".

Seems to be run by Come Back Alive Foundation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Back_Alive) but I can't actually verify that they link to the Patreon from their website (https://savelife.in.ua) as it seems to be offline right now.

Not to say it's sketchy to use Patreon for something of that importance, since Patreon has a reputation of pulling funding for organizations by now.

>The membership levels are also.. Disturbing?

Yeah, it feels strange to have these images. There are already discussions to change them in Ukrainian community because it's not really connected to what organization do.

People from Ukraine IT community don't care because they got all the information about the organization without language barriers, but this images seems to be a problem from the outside perspective as this is the first thing that people would notice.

Anyway, thank you for your feedback (I'm not from the organization, I know a few people who help there)

> All memberships are munition for weapons ("Bullet", "Projectile", "Bomb" and "Missile"), not exactly something you associate with "Saving lives".

In a simplistic view they don’t save lives, but without them what do you fight with? What keeps Russia from thinking they can just easily take over a country?

(sorry for delay, my account is for reads and I hit the limit of replays in HN, had to wait)

back in 2014 when sht hit the fan and Ukrainian army was very weak, ppl made it back strong with everything they could, donating money equipment and food, there was alot of volunteer organizations back then and these ones was one of the most well know, still operating to this day

tbh Idk how to reassure you they are true but here's their fb page with 3mln+ followers https://www.facebook.com/backandalive/

and here's the link of that IT community thing I've mentioned before https://dou.ua/forums/topic/36494/

hopefully those will provide some validation for you

Ok well that wasn't quite enough for me to believe you 100%, but it was enough for me to believe you 98% and that's enough for me to sign up for the top teir. If you're lieing to me or if someone is lieing to you, then even though I'll be dissapointed I'll forgive them or you.

I wish there was a better way of scaling trust online right now and I hope this war ends soon.

Edit: But I'm happy to believe I'm really supporting Ukraine with this donation.

I do not know any of them personally but I do trust them, as far as I remember back then they've started as one of the projects on Ukrainian crowdfunding website https://biggggidea.com/project/blagodijnij-fond-povernis-zhi...

I'm a vet of this war and few mins ago I've was called back to service and most likely I'm about to go back at war zone again pretty soon

so for me personally your support of Ukraine means a lot, thank you man

You are welcome. If you'd like to chat please let me know. I stayed for a month in Kiev and I'd apreciate talking to a hacker from the region. I'm best reached on Twitter, since my email gets so much spam.

sorry I'm a little bit busy rn, havnt sleep in 4 days, really busy being back in army, will be busy still for a while

Same. Not knowing anyone in Ukraine to validate, I am unsure.

Is it assistant for the Azov battalion?

For those unaware of Russian propaganda campaigns, the comment above is basically the same as the "I saw Confederate flags at the trucker protest" strategy of dismissing the legitimate interests of millions of normal people.

I'm not sure if there's a name for this strategy (beyond "whataboutism"), but it's annoyingly effective and can be used by both the left and the right. An example of the latter would be claiming that all racial justice protesters (and Democrats generally) are Antifa rioters and looters.

It seems to work by exploiting the "ultimate attribution error" bias in human psychology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_attribution_error

It's called 'false flag'.

Vereinigte Falschflaggenfuchtler! <- German for 'United wavers(frenetically) of false flags'

Yes, there's a huge incentive to launch a false flag operation in order to give a justification for dismissing (or attacking) a wider group, but unfortunately the strategy works even if there is no false flag.

Has there ever been a protest movement that was big enough to gain attention but didn't have some small minority in it that went too far? Sadly nowadays there are probably people who just want to watch the world burn and will turn out to commit crimes under the cover of any protest, no matter the politics of the protest itself.

When politics (and the media) are so polarised, it's easy to highlight the worst examples of "the other side" while ignoring any inconvenient examples of one's own side, if necessary by erroneously attributing those examples to false flags.

The right to protest cannot meaningfully exist in a society where the powerful get to write the narratives about who the protesters are and what they are doing.

The thing with movements that are/were big enough to gain attention is that they get infiltrated, and those infiltrators are pushing farther to discredit them.

Or they are being astro-turfed from some external party, like the color-revolutions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution

It's an honest and legitimate question. The US government has been funding them, it's only fair we know if these funds are going to them.

https://fair.org/home/what-you-should-really-know-about-ukra...