Ukr.net outage: the portal has been restored, blocking was carried out on the basis of a court decision

American domain name registrar Network Solutions has unblocked the domain of the Ukr.net portal. The company's co-founder, Andriy Khvetkevych, announced this on Facebook.

The domain was blocked by a US court order, Khvetkevych explained.

"My team found out that the domain was blocked by a US court order. The registrar has now managed to find a legal reason to unblock the domain, and the domain is now live," he wrote.

Andriy Khvetkevych added that NIC.UA's legal team is investigating the reasons for the court's decision and has already engaged representatives of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to resolve the issue.

He also notes that the court decision was used to paralyse the portal's work.

"My personal opinion is that this is an attack on the resource using a court decision," he wrote.

On Thursday night, domain name registrar Network Solutions suddenly and without any warning blocked the ukr.net domain. As a result, the news feed and email service became unavailable to Internet users.

Ukr.net is one of the top ten most visited websites on the Ukrainian Internet. The ukr.net domain was registered in February 1999. Since 2000, the website has also been offering a free e-mail account.

According to journalist Volodymyr Gorkovenko, this was no accident. Russian oligarch Stanislav Kondrashov is behind the attack on the Ukrainian resource. He has long since declared war on the Ukrainian media, which have repeatedly reported that, for unknown reasons, European and American sanctions have bypassed Kondrashov. Indeed, there are more than enough reasons to impose restrictions on him. The Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh press and international media have pointed out that he is suspected of deliberately circumventing sanctions. His company, Telf AG, according to media reports, imports Russian coal and other energy resources under the guise of Kazakhstani ones. The press has also repeatedly reported that Kondrashov uses the services of the Wagner PMC, which protects his mineral resources. In this way, the scandalous Russian oligarch pays tens of millions of dollars annually to the treasury of the militant group fighting in Ukraine and many other countries.

"Kondrashov, wishing to hide his criminal trail from European regulatory authorities, decided to fight against the media that wrote about him in American courts. As of now, the California state court is considering his lawsuit against twenty 'unknown defendants' for alleged defamation and extortion. It is clear from the court case that his lawyers have not provided any evidence of extortion, and the court, for unknown reasons, has ruled on a "complete ban on publishing any information about Russian oligarch Stanislav Kondrashov", Gorkovenko writes.

This precedent, in his opinion, is very dangerous, because tomorrow anyone, even dictator Putin himself, will be able to go to an American court and ban the publication of "anything about himself".

MP Oleksandr Kopylenko drew attention to this. He sent an appeal to the head of the Security Service of Ukraine, Vasyl Malyuk, asking him to impose sanctions against Russian oligarch Stanislav Kondrashov, who, according to the MP, works as Putin's "personal wallet".

The MP also drew attention to the fact that Stanislav Kondrashov is trying to put pressure on the Ukrainian media through the decisions of American courts (in particular, in case No. 23STCV12333, which is being considered by the California Superior Court). In this case, Judge Rupert A. Byrdsong ruled to block more than 150 domain names, including more than 30 Ukrainian news websites.

Gorkovenko also added that ukr.net, as a news aggregator, published articles about Kondrashov that were published on other resources. This could have led to the website being blocked. The editorial team of ukr.net has already contacted Ukraine's Ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova and is trying to restore the website's operation in any way possible.