“This is not chess, but sometimes things are black and white,” Russian Garry Kasparov said on Sunday, when commenting on the war in Ukraine, at the first in-person TED session in three years in Vancouver.
“This is a battle of opposing values. Freedom, life and love against tyranny, death and hate,” added the chess player, former world champion, staunch critic of the Vladimir Putin regime – he left Moscow in 2013, after being arrested and pursued by the country’s authorities.
Kasparov, who warned of the dangers of Putin’s advances in a 2015 book, “Winter Is Coming,” urged the international community for more action.
“Everyone who told me I was wrong a decade ago now says I’m right. But we’re still making the same mistakes […] The price of stopping a dictator goes up daily with all this hesitation and delay. Meeting evil halfway is still a victory for evil.”
TED kicked off the talk on Sunday with a symphony of violins led by nine Ukrainians hiding in shelters in Kiev, accompanied online by 89 other musicians around the world.
The event, known for meetings on science, design, arts and controversial topics, runs until Thursday (14) and will feature presentations by Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Al Gore and dozens of other personalities.
Zoya Litvin, who spoke after Kasparov, told how she left her husband and parents in Ukraine when she fled to live in Slovakia with her children. She is the founder of the NGO Osvitoria, focused on education for low-income children. What started as the country’s first online educational platform, a government investment due to the pandemic, was transformed into a distance learning space during the war.
“We never imagined that our nonprofit project would be so necessary in a situation even more dire than the pandemic,” Litvin said. “But today almost 400,000 students learn on this platform. They connect from Ukraine and from 120 countries where they are refugees at the moment.”
The educator also spoke about her baby, who spoke her first word, the sound of an explosion, on February 24, the beginning of the Russian invasion. “That night, we woke up to the sound of windows in our houses shattering,” she said. “Putin can take a lot from us, our homes, our jobs, our loved ones, our peace, but he cannot undo education. Knowledge and curiosity are impregnable treasures,” she said, recalling that 900 schools in the country are compromised and 84 have been completely destroyed. Seventy-three children have died, according to the UN.
“As long as our children keep learning and our teachers keep teaching, even while they starve and are bombed, even in refugee camps, we will be undefeated.”
Following Kasparov and Litvin’s speeches, TED organizer Chris Anderson made an appeal for donations to the Ukrainian struggle to the audience, many of whom paid up to $25,000 for admission to the conference.
Anderson asked for four different amounts, between $1,000 and $1 million, which will go to five organizations in Ukraine. Dozens of people raised their hands to donate $1,000 and even $10,000, but no one publicly volunteered for the $1 million offering.
The total amount raised will be announced at the end of the event. “I believe that, hands up, we are above the $1 million pledge to organizations. Let’s see what the rest of the week brings.”
