Kyiv-based OPORA, which has been sharpest in criticism of Ukraine’s Oct. 31 regional election and had one of the largest monitoring missions, suspects that foul play was behind repeated crashing of its website during the election period.
The U.S.-funded OPORA, a non-governmental organization, said the crashes occurred just as its nearly 1,500 monitors were compiling a long list of evidence about violations that occurred during the election, posting it up on the website as publicly available evidence for use in assessing the election’s fairness.
OPORA officials said website access was suspiciously interrupted on more than one server. Email service also went down sporadically.
“Our main site went down sporadically throughout the day on Oct. 31, and then went down completely from about 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.,” said Olha Aivazovska, chairman of OPORA.
According to Aivazovska, the situation repeated itself on Nov. 1. She said another OPORA-related site which focuses on activities in Lviv, the largest city in western Ukraine, also went down during the election period, on the Friday just ahead of the vote. The fact that it is hosted on a separate server from the main site has triggered suspicions that a targeted hacker attack against OPORA’s sites could have been at play.
OPORA came out on Nov. 1 with
