My interview with Kanyuk, from Flash Battalion, on how he volunteered to fight for Ukraine, became a drone pilot, got injured... and how he wants to get back in the fight as soon as he recovers.
"It's just a flesh wound!" 😁
I filmed this about a month ago; for his safety I had to wait until he got out of hospital and left Kyiv to actually publish the video.
I didn't know it at the time. But it turns out I actually spoke to Kanyuk and another soldier at his position a few months ago. They had a problem with their generator, and I was helping them debug it. In the end I found a replacement generator small enough to fly into forward positions on a vampire drone, a technique that we used for a different forward position that had also lost its generator.
Most of the donations I've been getting have been through the $LADA memecoin. But I'm also accepting Bitcoin donations:
bc1qdds28nk2n69kc2zh0y62flnxarsp2lv80tn8t5
Great interview. My favourite line:
💡
I’ve been wondering for a while why you care about this. I do not intend to imply you or anyone else shouldn’t care, I’m just curious: do you have Ukrainian heritage?
I don’t. Still, I care that certain individual Ukrainian people don’t die, people like Orlovski.
But I don’t have any personal stake in what feels like a gang war, from a more libertarian, non starist perspective, or beyond a general sentiment that wars are bad for all regular non profiteering people, enough to send money or spend time killing other human beings.
These people have hated eachother for centuries before you or i was born, and will continue to hate eachother centuries after us...
Why do you care about this and not other conflicts equaly sovereignty encroaching?
I ask because u seem fanatically certain other people should care about this war as much as you do, to the exclusion of other wars and territorial encroachments going on elsewhere in the world at the same moment.
You and everybody else supporting this Zionist war of attrition are idiots. The only certainty of continuation is the death of all of Ukraine's men; which is almost certainly the objective.
Steve Jermy (Commodore Fleet Air Arm) is absolutely right...
Can you describe in your own words why you believe Ukraine is a Zionist war?
probably some application of "intersectionality"
Surprising to hear that he wants to be on the front lines. Definitely a little crazy like he says. Despite all the death around him, he looks like he is living his best life.
I hope the war ends soon.
Also @petertodd you and I wear the same shoes. 😆
I didn't cover it in my interview or talk to him directly about I. But I've been told that he is a Christian with strong beliefs that he has a duty to fight evil in the world. His faith is certainly a part of this. Ukraine itself is probably the most Christian county in Europe; Russia pretends to be for propaganda. But they're actually a combination of amoral atheism and Islam – about 20% of their population.
The other factor is that once you see Russians killing your friends and the civilian population, you get pissed... For example, I know another medic in Kanyuk's unit who had to spend multiple days trying to save the life of a elderly Ukrainian civilian in a front line town that was nearly killed by an 100% intentional Russian FPV attack.
Russians are staggeringly evil.
what an asshole
https://youtu.be/T0DE7JWI5hA?t=305
Thanks for your work, Peter. Again, the comment section here proves that the average Bitcoiner is an idiot.
Slava Ukraini.
You promote a shitcoin?
I can tell you something about volunteers in ukraine:
Ukraine has 16,000 mercenaries from 72 countries deployed. They receive an average salary equivalent to around €5,800 a month, while troops assigned to particularly high-risk assault missions are reportedly sometimes paid nearly twice as much.
And who pays for all this? We do, of course!
Have you heard about the protests in columbia?
Poor people dying for money in ukraine and ukraine not even paying promised compensation.
But ukraine promised 350.000 dollar death benefit.
now do the math!
source: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/why-colombias-veterans-are-going-to-war-in-ukraine
...your point?
That's not very much money considering how staggeringly dangerous that job is. And soldiers are expected to pay for far more stuff than any normal military. They even wind up buying their own vehicles and fuel in many circumstances.
Now, the good thing about this system is capitalism: soldiers have strong incentives to use the funding wisely, and supply chains to provide all this stuff develop naturally. It also means that a significant % total military funding comes from volunteer efforts: I personally have collected something like $60k of funding. That lets the Ukrainian government focus more on funding things that are difficult for volunteers to provide, such as the Ukrainian long range drone, cruise missile, and ballistic missile programs.
Speaking of, some of the results of those programs:
Adults can chose to gamble their money away. Memecoins don't make any promises.
Anons are cowards hiding behind the veneer of privacy because I am too important to disclose my nym
even a d bag wetback like darth doesn't hide behind anon
Realize, real eyes, real lies.
what about a lightning address?
Yeah, I wish there was a good way to set that up. Thing is I want the donations to be transparent for accountability. Which is hard to do with lightning as lightning inherently has very good privacy.
Geyser would be one way to do that... except they screwed up their payment mechanism, and they've banned anything Ukraine related on top of that.
70% of the Bitcoin tips on this do in fact go to me. So one solution could be to use the stacker news story. But 30% isn't small. :)
In Ukraine some banks apparently offer transparent accounts for charities, where every transaction is public. Obviously, that's trusting the bank. But something similar for lightning isn't a bad idea. And there are ways to make that stronger cryptographically. But of course, actually implementing that will be a lot of work.
Yeah, to make it transparent you would probably have to vibe/build a custom solution. You would have to run a node (at least something like phoenixd) and for example create profile on nostr and publish events about any donation (plus it would also serve as another entrypoint for the donation) and then some monthly summary note. I haven't heard about anything prepackaged for this except for geyser and so it's sad to hear that didn't work out.
Another option is some form of donations page / solution on SN that takes smaller cut. What would be reasonable for you? 10%? @k00b
The point is - k00b doesn't get either 30% or 10%, everything go to the reward pool. These fee just prevent spam and cheating with "lit" system and never make k00b rich
What about Coinos?
in my experience coinos tends to be unreliably, sometimes down, sometimes issue with older nwc, etc.
NWC has been a problem with Coinos but I think they have fixed those issues
The platform is not perfect but if perfection is your requirement then Coinos will not work
Good luck searching for perfection
I am using it and there's always something. Last issue was 1-2 weeks ago.
they have a support email
maybe try using it
I've never used it. Can it make a transcript of payments public?
I think so... I can ask the founder Adam
What about zaps or donations via Nostr? or dare I say X?
In my experience, the transcript of payments is not public but Coinos has API that I have not dabbled with
I think the best way to reach Coinos or Adam is Nostr or Telegram or email
https://github.com/coinos/
@adam_coinos_io @coinos @coinoswallet
deleted by author
I don't think Adam's into genocide.
https://m.stacker.news/151697
https://m.stacker.news/151698
Honestly, 'transparent donations' and 'lightning privacy' aren't the tradeoff people keep making them out to be. One public receive address + a signed monthly breakdown gives donors the audit trail without doxxing every donor. The missing piece is tooling, not a ledger of everyone's wallet