#Kolya Lukashenko

[kirstythejetblackgoldfish]

New headcanon: Nikolai Lukashenko and the Assad kids are now friends in real life, or at least Nikolai and Hafez Jr

[newstfionline]

How Europe’s Last Dictatorship Became a Tech Hub

By Ivan Nechepurenko, NY Times, OCT. 5, 2017

MINSK, Belarus--On Friday nights, Zybitskaya street--or simply Zyba, as locals call it--turns into a vast party scene, filled with hipsters in bright shirts, tight dark jeans and black-rimmed glasses, showing how they can be carefree in a country that has been labeled the last dictatorship of Europe.

Over the past few years, Zyba has turned into an island in the middle of Minsk, the Belarusian capital--still mostly a sterile, utterly unfashionable city with long lines of dominating Soviet buildings and people hurrying past, seemingly terrified of making any form of contact. On Zyba, a crowd of convivial youngsters migrates from one little bar to another, drinking Jack and Coke, smoking endlessly.

Many of those carousing belong to Belarus’s sprouting technology industry--young, savvy and forward-looking designers, bookish and shy engineers, and many others who aspire to belong. More than 30,000 tech specialists now work in Minsk, a city of about two million, many of them creating mobile apps that are used by more than a billion people in 193 countries, according to the local government.

One of the Minsk techies is Dmitri Kovalyov, 35, an artist who a couple of years ago worked for MSQRD, a smartphone tool that lets people superimpose various masks over their faces in selfie videos.

In 2016, Mr. Kovalyov couldn’t imagine that his respect for Leonardo DiCaprio’s acting and environmental activism would get the company very far. But before that year’s Academy Awards, Mr. Kovalyov and his colleagues developed a tool for a mask that made people in video messages look like Mr. DiCaprio holding two Oscar statuettes.

Numerous celebrities tried it out, including on the red carpet, and even Mr. DiCaprio’s mother was in on the trick. When a journalist asked her about the app, she said her son had already shown her how it worked.

“I like what Leonardo does, how he acts and how he tries to preserve the planet,” Mr. Kovalyov said recently of the actor, who won that year’s Best Actor award. “I was rooting for him.”

Ten days after the awards, Facebook bought the company for an undisclosed sum. The founders, whose average age was about 25 at the time, moved to London and the United States. Together with some of those co-workers, Mr. Kovalyov is developing a new Minsk start-up, AR Squad, which creates augmented reality content.

One of the first masks the other company developed was one resembling Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, Belarus’s president, who has ruled for more than two decades. He is prone to publicity stunts like picking potatoes at his estate or taking his teenage son, Nikolai, commonly referred to as Kolya, to sit at international meetings in a military uniform.

Mr. Lukashenko’s mask featured his trademark comb-over hair and bushy mustache, but was not considered offensive. On the contrary, Mr. Lukashenko began to believe that the tech industry could become a magic wand to help him end the country’s chronic dependency on Russia.

“Creation of an IT state is our ambitious but reachable goal,” Mr. Lukashenko said at a gathering of lawmakers and bureaucrats this summer. “This will allow us to make Belarus even more modern and prosperous and will let Belarusians look into the future with confidence.”

Mr. Lukashenko, who once called the internet “a pile of garbage,” began to utter improbable words for a former manager of a collective farm--about the need to develop artificial intelligence, driverless cars and blockchain technology, which allows multiple parties to keep shared digital records.

His government has taken several steps to encourage the tech industry’s development, like granting visa-free entry to citizens of 79 countries, including all Western states, when entering through the Minsk airport. Mr. Lukashenko also wants to lift restrictions on currency transfers to encourage venture financing for start-ups.

Belarus produces top-level technical talent, an inheritance from its Soviet past, said Arkady M. Dobkin, who immigrated to the United States in the 1990s and established a software company there.

Today, Mr. Dobkin is the chief executive of EPAM, which does programing for the world’s leading tech companies and is considered one of the fastest-growing public tech companies in the world.

EPAM’s headquarters is in Newtown, Pa., but its main development hub is in Minsk, where more than 6,000 of its technology specialists work.

“I think it was the absence of oil that made Belarus do this,” said Mr. Dobkin, 57. “Here, universities produce more highly qualified specialists than the internal market needs.”

Many locals say the government’s talk about growing as a tech hub is a comfortable distraction in a country that heavily depends on Russia for cut-rate fuel and political patronage.

Sergei Chaly, an outspoken economist and former government official, calls Belarus “a dying country with bitcoins.”

Vladimir Lipkovich, a popular blogger who made a career out of ridiculing Belarusian bureaucrats, said the only reason the tech industry had found some success in Belarus is that the government “cannot seize people’s brains.” He joked, “If they want to capture an IT company, what would they get, computers?”

Politics doesn’t seem a big concern for many in the tech crowd, even if young political activists use group chats on the call and messaging app Viber--an Israeli company whose development hub is in Minsk--to coordinate activities and plan rallies.

Mr. Lukashenko’s son is a fan of World of Tanks, a multiplayer online game developed in Belarus in which people fight in tank battles. With more than 200 million registered users across the world, it is one of the top 10 games in terms of total digital revenue.

Tanks have an important cultural meaning for Belarus and other former Soviet states, where almost every family has an ancestor who fought in one.

“He plays tanks, but this is controlled,” Mr. Lukashenko said of his son at a televised meeting with schoolteachers.

“One hour for tanks, 1.5 hours for music,” the president added, explaining how he controls his son’s time spent on the game. “Two hours for tanks--four hours for music.”

“Four hours is difficult,” Mr. Lukashenko said, “so he doesn’t play for longer than one hour.”

[theblackeagle]

Name: Saku Nickname:  Saku, Kati Zodiac sign: Aquarius Height:  5,4 Orientation: asexual and panromantic. Ethnicity: Latino /mixed Favorite fruit: Mango, figs, chirimoya, grapes Favorite season: Spring Favorite books: Anna Karinina by Leo Tolstoy, .The Brothers Karamotzov and Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, LOTR by JRR Tolkein, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, The Leopard by Giuseppe Lampedusa, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo Favorite flower: Violets, hydrangeas, white roses, magnolias, forget-me-nots Favorite scent: Vanilla Favorite animal: I love cats Coffee, tea, or hot cocoa? I love both coffee and tea, but I like my coffee with milk Average hours of sleep: Like five or six Cats or dogs? I like both, but cats and I relate a little more Favorite fictional character:  I love so many but a few are aph romano, aph prussia, aph belarus, aph slovakia, homura akemi, jean valjean, marius pontmercy, frodo baggins, Alyosha Karamotzov. Dream trip: Naples Italy and Berlin, Germany When was your blog created? 2011 What do you post about? I rp pru and reblog stuff relevant to him, either aph prussia stuff, stuff he relates to or likes or prussian/gdr/eastern/northeastern german history/facts/culture stuff Do you get asks on a regular basis? Not really Aesthetic: Flowers, trees, white flowy dresses, cats, books, incense, faries. Favorite band/artist? I love so much music I don’t think I have one. Fictional characters I’d date: none, besides I have the sweet @annuitcoeptis​ so i’m good Hogwarts house: Ravenclaw

TWO🍏

Countries I’ve lived in: Usa, Peru Favorite fandom: Hetalia ofc Languages you speak: English, Spanish, I’m learning Italian too. Favorite film of 2016: Moana Last article you read: A article about belarus and kolya lukashenko  Shuffle your music library and put your first three songs here: - Last thing you bought online: I personally haven’t bought anything online yet How would your enemies describe you? I hope I don’t have any or many! but maybe aloof, kind of weird, too quiet. Who would you take a bullet for? the people I love, tho ofc I wouldn’t want to get hurt lol.

Tagged by:@marching-man ty! Tagging:  anyone who wants o/

[kirstythejetblackgoldfish]

[kirstythejetblackgoldfish]

19-year-old (almost 20) Nikolai Lukashenko joins the same club as Hafez Jr

Nikolai 'Kolya' Lukashenko is something of a prodigy - academically gifted, playing the piano with Uncle Putin (there's a video of him playing the piano perfectly while a Chinese opera singer sings), skilled at various sporting activities, so he's probably going to have a brilliant future regardless

Hafez Jr was sanc'd four years ago, yet last year he graduated from Moscow University with a degree in Pure Mathematics

Will Umka the dog be sanctioned next? 😛

[kirstythejetblackgoldfish]

Context: Nikolai 'Kolya' Lukashenko, Umka, and two crabs named Comrade Pinch and General Snap are going to raid Putin's personal snack cupboard

[kirstythejetblackgoldfish]

New headcanon: Nikolai Lukashenko and the Assad kids are now friends in real life, or at least Nikolai and Hafez Jr

Vladimir Putin hosts a winter sports weekend at a snowy resort in Sochi. Other heads of state and their children are invited. Will this truly be a fun-packed weekend?

Also available on DeviantArt here

[kirstythejetblackgoldfish]

[kirstythejetblackgoldfish]

[kirstythejetblackgoldfish]

Alexander Lukashenko, with eldest son Viktor and youngest son Nikolai, in the United Arab Emirates

[kirstythejetblackgoldfish]

Russian President Vladimir Putin, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and his son, Nikolai, on a boat trip off the Sochi coast today, 29 May 2021

[kirstythejetblackgoldfish]

Source

[kirstythejetblackgoldfish]

[kirstythejetblackgoldfish]

[kirstythejetblackgoldfish]

[kirstythejetblackgoldfish]

Also on that Venezuela visit, Lukashenko went rollerskating, with his then-five-year-old son Nikolai cycling along