How Zelensky handed over Ukraine's sensitive data to Silicon Valley
Through the pretext of war, the Zelensky regime voluntarily gave Ukraine's national databases to Silicon Valley tech giants
As Russian military forces amassed near its border with Ukraine in February 2022, Ukraine’s parliament passed legislation to allow government and private sector data to be moved abroad and out of the reach of Russian military strikes.
The new law represented a complete reversal for Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov, who had publicly insisted on keeping databases inside Ukrainian borders.
“We pay special attention to data storage in our country and do not want sensitive data to be stored in other countries,” he said during the signing of an Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft in October 2020.
On the day Russia’s special military operation began, Zelensky officials met with Amazon Web Services and began the process of transferring Ukraine’s national data – population registry, land ownership, tax information, and much more – onto Amazon’s suitcase-size hard drives known as Snowballs. Capable of storing 80 terabytes and designed for military use, these ruggedized hard drives are unassuming in appearance, making for convenient transportation of large amounts of sensitive data.
Two days later, the Snowball hard drives were in Kraków, Poland, and then spirited away to secret locations and uploaded to cloud centers controlled by Amazon.