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Leaflet was created 11yrs ago by Vladimir Agafonkin, a Ukrainian citizen in Kyiv (leafletjs.com)
436 points by tzm on March 4, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 80 comments


Vladimir Agafonkin here. Thanks for posting this! I'll be happy to answer any questions about Russia's invasion of Ukraine and current Ukrainian reality here whenever I get the chance.


There was a Russian troll here asking why I didn't leave earlier even though I knew this would happen, and whether I'm planning on bribing officials to avoid conscription. I already wrote the answers but the parent comment was flagged, so posting here:

1. Most people I know didn't believe Putin would suicidally start a large-scale invasion, despite potentially severe losses (~10k Russian soldiers killed so far in a week) and the complete destruction of Russian economy. Many thought US intelligence' warnings were a part of the information warfare for deterrence. We were wrong. Putin is actually this insane.

2. I registered where I'm staying locally and the military have my number / temp address if they need me. But the number of volunteers to fight WAY exceeds military capacity, so for now I'm staying in the rear and helping where I can make the most impact — by rallying donations, consulting IT volunteers on local map projects, and spreading the truth. I'm contemplating getting my wife and kids through the border but will stay in Ukraine myself, like other Ukrainian men.


I absolutely sympathize with your situation - and I thank you for talking from the field (as well as for leaflet itself, which powers my daily work !)

However, just to get your opinion, do you feel the figures of Russian casualties are realistic ? (I guess you don't have any privileged information, but is there any "word of mouth" about the figures ?)

Anyway, we'll find out in the future.

Stay safe, thanks again, and good luck to you and your loved ones.


Those are official stats from Ukrainian Armed Forces, and they are absolutely realistic, even if approximate. If you're in doubt, follow Bellingcat, OSINTtechnical and people like Christo Grozev who coordinate open source intelligence / confirmation based on available photos / videos. They mostly confirm those numbers.


How about the one off battle stats? There seem to keep being reports of hundreds of vehicles destroyed in singular events. These don't seem to be reflected in the totals even days later though. I'm not clear on whether its because they don't actually have the capacity to count this stuff or if its partially bluster.


Some individual accounts may be exaggerated, but totals are already pretty severe. A lot of stuff isn’t counted too.


What's the most useful thing that can be done for support if you're just some rando on the other side of the world with money?


Donate here https://www.comebackalive.in.ua/donate, stop supporting the Russian economy and reject their products, rally local leaders to strengthen economic sanctions and increase Ukrainian support.


Hi mourner ,

When I visit the website you gave

https://www.comebackalive.in.ua/

My computer's antivirus gave me a warning that it is an unreliable website.

However , via wikipedia , I found this

https://comebackalive.org.ua/

Perhaps I should donate to

.org.ua

instead of

.in.ua

?

Please advise.

Thanks.


The canonical link is https://www.comebackalive.in.ua/, but the others seem to have the same donation info, so they should be legit.


mourner,

I hope you and your family are well.

I think https://comebackalive.org.ua is a phishing website, which has now appeared on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Back_Alive

It was created a few weeks ago in 2022, unlike

https://www.comebackalive.in.ua/

which was created 7 years ago.

Also, I cannot find

comebackalive.org.ua

being referenced anywhere on their old website

https://savelife.in.ua/

Perhaps you could use your connenctions to tell them somebody is impersonating them for phishing purposes?



Thanks for the pointers.

I have the "living in peace-time democracy" luxury of taking "official" figures with a grain of salt - but I'm pretty sure your government is waaaaaay behind Moscow's one as far as propaganda is concerned.

Again, thanks and good luck.


"The pen is mightier than the sword."


Good luck with everything Vladimir! I have fond memories of working together and visiting you and the rest of our team in Kyiv back in 2008 and 2009.


Me too! I remember those first OSM mapping parties fondly. Hope we meet again.


You work for Mapbox, a US-based company with offices around the world.

Do you still perform your day-to-day work? How's the relationship with your colleagues these days? I'm curious about the people in Belarus in particular.


No, Mapbox has been very supportive, trying to help however they can and obviously not expecting me (or anyone else in Ukraine) to work any time soon.

Same for colleagues from Belarus and even Russia — they are strongly pro-Ukraine and anti-war, although stating this publicly can easily get them in jail (already happened multiple times).


are they still paying you?


Yes. Although I’m intentionally delaying invoices so that I have unrealized funds outside of the country, just in case.


I'll have your back regardless, let me know and if you and/or your wife and kids need to come to the West I'll be more than happy to pay your way/assist in any way that is required. Mail me: jacques@modularcompany.com Hang in there and stay safe, all of you. Scary times!


Good luck Vladimir Agafonkin. I seems trivial with the current events but I wanted to let you know that I consider Leaflet to be one of my favorite programming projects and one of the most useful projects of all time; several years ago I wrote generic Web Components and JS code to handle it because I consider it such a useful and great project.

I live in Los Angeles, California, USA and while I'm far I will find a way to help. There are many Ukrainians where I live so I will find something to volunteer for ideally (I saw something recently), or I will donate money, or both. I hope that you, your family, and friends live through these hard times. In 2022 I's unbelievable what is happening. Stay safe and good luck.


Have you thought about what will be left of your home and your family's belongings when you return to Kyiv? Have you thought about what returning to Kyiv will be like? The closest approximation to what you're going through in my life is tornadoes: the eerie siren out of nowhere, taking everybody close to you to shelter, calling loved ones to make sure they're safe. But at least the storm passes after an hour or two. I'm so sorry that this is happening to your family, Vladimir.


I accept the possibility that I could return to a bunch of rubble, but I would very much like to return home if/after the war stops and Putin's regime collapses, and rebuild and create with renewed vigor. Most of the things we left behind aren't critical and could be reacquired elsewhere. The most important thing is that my wife and kids are safe and by my side.


You're braver than I'll ever be. I'm wishing you and your family peace and safety.


I don't feel brave, just reacting to the situation like all Ukrainians. There are powerful psychological defence mechanisms at play too.


Hi Vlad. I want to wish you safety and hoping for peace.

I read about setting up defenses and waiting to repel invaders, but I was wondering if you know about any Ukrainian army offensives. I wasn't sure if it wasn't possible, or if they were waiting for a better time, or maybe it just isn't a better strategy than remaining in a defensive position, or maybe they just aren't being reported.


I heard some reports of limited offensives, notably in Horlivka and near the border around Sumy, although they still seem to serve defensive purposes. Ukrainian Army avoids offensives because the Russians often set up positions in densely populated civilian areas.


Maybe it's an inane question, but what's it like? Which aspects of your life have some normality and which don't?


We left most of our stuff behind and are now staying with wife and kids in a tiny hotel room, mostly glued to the terrible news, calling to our friends and family and seeing where we can help. Running to the bomb shelter during an air raid siren about 3–4 times a day, sitting in the basement for 10–60 min at a time. But we're glad to have a roof, a place to sleep and shower, power for devices, an Internet connection and food and water — many in Ukraine including some of our extended family don't have those luxuries.


Thank you. I hope you all stay safe.


Is it just my impression that the Ukrainian government is seemingly very competent?


It's miraculous transformation — I was against the current government, like many of my friends, it did its share of mistakes in recent years, but this huge existential threat seems to have propelled them to rise up to the occasion with intense focus and do the right thing. I'm now quite proud of the Ukrainian government.


[flagged]


And the official russian propaganda arrived to HN.


This is such an bad faith take I don't even know how to engage with this. It's not that you believe it was installed in a CIA backed coup, you just _KNOW_ it.

Being from Eastern Europe, I can tell you, it is worth standing up to Russia and not kowtowing to it. It's normal people want to live in close connection with the western world and not in whatever the heck kind of local order Russia is trying to create. And, also, yes, orange man was unbelievably bad and led to the destabilization of the world around. Calling anti-Trumpism stupidity, lets me believe you are the one living in a delusion unable to consider the realities of the world.


No you don't understand power politics, sorry you're leaning on your own experience instead of the expert approved only USA and Russia matters geopolitical framework. No way that without CIA puppet masters Ukrainians would use their own will (after all non-powers countries have no will or agency) to choose to orient West like the failed Baltic states and Poland instead of being a thriving Russian vassal like Belarus


I enjoyed reading this, but the sarcasm might fly over a lot of people's heads. :)


So are we at the point where we deny the Nuland thing every happened? None of this happened under the foreign policy of Trump. I support Ukrainian self determination but this is not what happened and even if it is it is not how Russia perceives which seems entirely reasonable.


I think Russian motivation works completely different than the way you believe it works. Assigning perfect rationality all the time is a mistake, and misses what I believe is Putin's motivation, recreating Russia as a regional power, and bringing back the old USSR satellites. It's a matter of pride and feelings of offended national pride are a dime a dozen in Eastern Europe.


>bringing back the old USSR satellites

This is basically equivalent to saying Putin is retarded because there is no way they can pull this off. Putin has acted exactly how he said he would act since at least 2008 when NATO membership was proposed. I'm inclined to believe the words of someone who acts consistently with them rather than your literal bandwagon fallacy.


Putin _is_ consistent, but not with his words but with his actions. He is not thinking in the short term, but in the long term, how can he make Russia a bigger player on the world stage. I repeat, assigning perfect reason to Putin is a mistake, he's driven by ideas that override immediate pragmatism.

His claims of NATO security threats are a veil, a lie. I think this post sells it quite well: https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/t2mb0c/the...


Ukraine has held TWO elections since 2014. Those events are moot at this point.


If you look at election and poll results there is a clear east/west divide in Ukraine. It is not moot and ignoring this factor is woefully uninformed about the causes and perceptions of this event in the east.


Lots of countries are polarized. Doesn't mean you can spout nonsense about the events of 2014 when two elections cycles have passed since then. That would be like starting a war with the US in 2028 because you think 2020 was stolen.


Always funny to read these incredibly dumb & crazy conspiracy theories, and not surprising given how much shit Trump & Putin's propaganda put into your heads.


Thank you Mr. Agafonkin. I hope you and your family are safe. I also hope you can return to your home country one day, otherwise you are always welcome in ours.


Leaflet is literally my favorite piece of software. So refreshing compared to any other web framework I have had to work with. Thank you for creating it and of course go Ukraine and fuck Putin!


In what ways do you find your work on maps to be translatable to the Ukrainian defence effort?

Stay safe...


Not translatable at the moment. Military command is obviously behind a closed curtain. Any public mapping efforts may help the enemy as much as Ukrainians, so so far they've been semi-private — e.g. official one-way sites / messenger bots to report enemy sightings / positions.


[flagged]


Your account really reads like russian propaganda. Lol.


I wonder why.

Also for anyone without showdead enabled, RamblingCTO is not replying to Vladimir but to another comment that got (rightfully) killed within a minute or two.


Ah thank you, didn't even notice. Funnily enough, the karma doesn't count for my reply on the shadow banned comment. Strange


There are also other Ukrainian companies you know and products you use. My top pick is Grammarly - IMHO by far the best automatic proofreader, both when it comes to suggestions and its UI.

GitLab is another one.



Free alternate open source to Grammarly. Its almost at par with it.

https://languagetool.org/


It may be a good tool, but that demo on the front page is silly. Doesn't actually show you what errors you made, rather prompts you to pay.


> Its almost at par with it.

I found it better for German (though I’ve been using it so long, I can’t remember if Grammarly supported German at all).


How does Hemingway compare?


Ah, good to see it here. Needs the signal boost.

I was on the fence on donating in the first days of the conflict, but when I saw this it firmly pushed me over the edge. We've been using leaflet for free in our product for quite some time, and I think it would be a dick move to ignore this plea in the current context.


Thank you so much for your support! Every little donation or even retweet helps.


so the loss of a product makes you want to donate but loss of life puts you on the fence. Wondering how’d make you feel if say, Romanians had to flee and no one would care since there isnt much made in romania.


People feel more responsible when they're personally involved. Doesn't seem very surprising to me (this isn't a value judgement.)

It has nothing to do with "loss of a product", it is about supporting an individual. That's a straw man you constructed.


I'm not the donation type myself but I think in this instance you chose your target wrong, as us, Romanians (I'm from Romania myself) have genuinely really tried to help our Ukrainian neighbours in these very dark times for them. I'm not going to give links to news stories, google is your friend for that, is enough to say that many of us, Romanians, were very pleasantly surprised ourselves of the whole thing, we're generally a little on the nihilistic side, so in a way that was also good for our national psyche.

Back to your question, and I can only answer for myself, yes, I would expect pretty much the same reaction and help that we gave to the Ukrainians from our neighbours if all this had happened to us, no matter if they're Bulgarians, Serbs or Hungarians.


I am a native of romania, gave up my citizenship for obvious reasons. Regular citizens have indeed stepped in. However, the government actively discourages arrivals from ukraine, and while the prime minister claimed they made preparations for half a million ukranians, that has proven to be false [1]. In effect, its mainly those of us that donated that helped ukranians, because tax payers money surely didnt.

The reason i chose romania while not directly stating that op is from that country, at least by user name, is because i didnt want it to turn into a personal thing.

I find it appalling that some will show ignorance, considering that romania is essentially financed by the western world. Even during this conflict romania’s only defense is nato, because the country lacks a proper army. We all know why and we all know that wont change. The expectation being that they (nato, us, eu) will “come and do it for us” and i simply dont share that mindset.

Having said that, some in romania have contributed to the country’s neighbour aid, while some simply dont care. But they do have a sense of entitlement. For instance, I am not entirely sure why you’d expect help from your neighbours given the above. Romania needs to be able to defend on its own and help those in need on its own before expecting handouts from pretty much everyone else, and now is the time to do it.

1. https://romania.europalibera.org/amp/31720871.html

Edit: grammar and all sorts. Bored of explaining fellow romanians that contributing to refugees is a duty and not an option. Romania is on the eternal receiving side and sometimes we have to contribute as well. Government wont, thus its up to regular folk. Glad that op and paganel are happy to rip the PR benefits from those that did contribute to this crisis.


> I am not entirely sure why you’d expect help from your neighbours given the above

Because it's the human thing to do, honestly, I expect from my country's neighbours to have humanly feelings, so to speak.

Only reading this latter comment of yours I realised that when you talked about help you most probably were talking about military (or something like that) help, in which case of course that the answer is more complicated.

This risks getting OT but imo us paying that protection fee (because that's what it is) of 2% of our budget each year (now expected to pass to 2.5%) is fair enough. Don't see how we would be able to put up an army worthy of that name that would stand a Russian invasion almost all by itself. The money just isn't there, i.e. for us doing it all ourselves. Maritime/sea defence is very expensive, air defence is very expensive, the whole cyber-security staff is pretty complicated and, while we might have some people for it, we most certainly don't have enough. We should play to our strengths, and, to be honest, we're not strong enough to stand up against the Russians all by ourselves, we never were.


Romanian support is felt immensely. Thank you!


See my reply for context. Appears like some are riding the pr wave while not actually contributing. And that ticks me off. We can do more. Stay safe!


Uh... didn't even think about loss of product. What moved me was debt already incurred.


Here is Vladimir's Twitter feed in case you want to see latest info related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine https://twitter.com/mourner


Vlad, I was using openlayers when leaflet was released and have been following your career. Big fan, thanks for always pushing the limits.

Lots of love from Colombia, to you and your family.

My question is: How have you approached communicating to your kids the current situation? I have been trying to explain to mine what is going on and it is really hard to maintain a balance between educating them and scaring them.


We're trying to be honest but optimistic at the same time. E.g. there's this crazy villain Putin who's trying to destroy Ukraine, that's why we had to move to a safer place, but there's a very strong Ukrainian Army that heroically defends against the bad guys, and we will eventually win and come back. My girls are pretty strong-willed and aren't easily scared, so they've been doing pretty well through this ordeal.


More open source projects made by Ukrainian developers https://github.com/chernivtsijs/made-in-ukraine


Hey Vlad, just came to say hi and wish you the best. You are one of the best engineers I have ever met, and one of the nicest persons too. It is really sad to see you and your entire country going through this. Will keep following your advice on how to support Ukraine and if there is any mapping support or anything else, well, you know where we are. We are following you closely. Big hug.


Thank you so much for the kind words Javier, hope to see you again soon!


How can we best help from US/EU? Donating mostly to German Red Cross (https://drk.de/nothilfe-ukraine) since I think it makes most sense to bring resources from outside Ukraine. DRK volunteers are driving convoys with supplies to Kyiv and other locations.

I've advised people to focus on monetary donations, to let charities buy supplies in bulk. Getting goods donated is often easier though -- in that case, what specific items are needed most?

What should US/EU citizens request from their governments right now to support Ukraine?

Thank you for Leaflet & all your other awesome geospatial projects! We stand with you and all of Ukraine.

Slava Ukraini!


I personally recommend donating to https://www.comebackalive.in.ua/donate, they're the forefront of Ukrainian military help at the moment. For humanitarian donations, Ukrainian Red Cross is reputable too https://redcross.org.ua/en/donate/

As for political support — pushing the government to increase sanction pressure, seizing Russian corrupt assets, increasing Ukrainian support, pushing for NATO no-fly zone all helps.


Is it worth it to try to get real news to Russian citizens? Apparently people are trying to post about the war in places that Russians can still access (e.g. reviews for high-end restaurants on Google maps). How much impact can this have?


It’s important, although hard. Ordinary people have to realize that it’s an actual bloody war happening with thousands killed on both side senselessly, and not just “military operation to defend Donbas”. Personally I’ve been sending Telegram channels with footage to my Russian relatives and friends, because Telegram is notoriously hard to block in Russia. Most non-state media are blocked, so are Facebook and Twitter.


That's been already blocked by Google, with reviews deleted, so not much I guess.


https://comebackalive.org.ua/donate/ worked for me. I tried the original url last night and ran into problems. Note you need to use UAH currency. $250 was 7336.23 UAH .. sorta sticker shock!




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