Earlier this year, an IT engineer named Roman Paramov was about to start a new job.

Romans from Ukraine.

He studied nuclear engineering in Kiev, and then he built a successful career in IT.

He worked remotely for a ton of Western companies.

This February, Roman was about to make a big move.

To Philadelphia, to work for a major Fortune 500 company.

And he was literally, he had the visas ready, he was moving his family,

everything was all systems go, and then the war broke out.

And he, like many talented Ukrainian engineers, decided that it was his patriotic duty to not move and be

comfortable in the West, but to go back and fight. That's Jillian Tet, F.T. Columnist and

chair of our U.S. editorial board. Jillian recently featured Roman in a piece she wrote about how

Ukraine is fighting a new type of war. I've linked to it in the show notes.

Gillian has been reporting on post-Soviet countries for decades, and she's been really taken

by the way Ukraine is fighting back against Russia. It's unusual. It reminds her of the open source

spirit of the Internet. Much of the defense of Ukraine has come about not because of top-down orders or vertical hierarchies,

but because of bottom-up improvisation by a huge number of digital savvy people working in the Ukrainian military. And what's fascinating

is that this network goes all the way over to Silicon Valley and has brought in a lot of

the techie entrepreneurs who've been driving American innovation in recent decades and are now

turning their attention to Ukraine.

It's been six months since the war in Ukraine started.

Today, we meet some of the people in Ukraine fighting it.

Gillian says that they're fighting a lateral war versus a vertical one,

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