Helping Ukraine

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is both a tragedy and a disaster. The international community's response to this war continues to evolve and governments are imposing new sanctions.

Our teams are working around the clock to support people in Ukraine through our products, defend against cyberattacks, surface high-quality, reliable information and ensure the safety and security of our colleagues and their families in the region.

We are taking a few actions.

$5 million has been raised so far from our employee matching campaign and $5 million in direct grants, which is part of the fifteen million dollars that we are giving to aid relief efforts in Ukraine. $5 million in advertising credits will be given to trusted humanitarian and intergovernmental organizations to connect people to important sources of aid.

We have launched an alert on Search. The United Nations has resources for refugees and asylum seekers when people search for information. As the situation unfolds, we are working with expert organizations to source helpful humanitarian information.

We temporarily disabled some live features of the Maps app in Ukraine to help protect the safety of local communities and their citizens after consulting with multiple sources on the ground. Information on refugee and migrant centers in neighboring countries has also been added.

Our security teams are on call. We have been taking action against Russia-backed hacking and influence operations for years. Over the past year, we have issued hundreds of government-backed attack warnings to people in Ukraine using products like Gmail. During the invasion, we have been particularly vigilant and our products will continue to detect and block suspicious activity.

The Threat Analysis Group has seen threat actors focus their efforts on Ukrainian targets, despite not seeing meaningful changes in the levels of malicious activity in this region. The attackers behind the GhostWriter threat group have targeted Ukrainian government and military officials. We did not see any compromise of the accounts as a result of this campaign.

As cyber threats evolve, we will continue to increase the security protections for people in the region. Hundreds of high-risk users in Ukraine are being protected by the Advanced Protection Program. Over 100 Ukrainian websites, including local news services, are already protected by Project Shield.

We are taking extraordinary measures to stop the spread of misinformation in this crisis.

We are blocking channels connected to Sputnik andRT across Europe. This builds on our pause of monetization of Russian state-funded media across our platforms, meaning that media outlets such asRT are not allowed to monetize their content or advertise on our platforms.

There are a number of Russian state-funded media outlets on our platforms. In the past few days, YouTube has removed hundreds of channels and thousands of videos for violating its Community Guidelines, including a number of channels engaging in coordinated deceptive practices.

We are trying to make reliable and trustworthy information readily available and reduce the reach of unreliable information. In times of crisis and rapidly-changing news, our systems prioritize the most authoritative information. Our systems surface information, videos and other key context from authoritative news sources when people search for topics related to the war in Ukraine.

We are very concerned for the safety of our Ukrainian team and their families. Since January, our local Security and People Operations teams have been working to provide help, including physical security support, paid leave, assistance options and reimbursement for housing, travel and food for anyone forced to leave their homes.

We are committed to complying with all sanctions requirements. Products like Google Pay may not be available in certain countries as individuals and regions are not allowed to use them.

Most of our services are still available in Russia, which means we can still provide access to global information and perspectives.

We will continue to monitor the situation and take additional actions as needed, and we will join the international community in expressing hope for a return to a peaceful and prosperous Ukraine.