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“Hey. You doing OK?” wrote Ross Barbieri, co-founder of Vancouver-based ToolBelt. It was February, and he was writing to his former freelance worker Egor Cotov, who lives in Vinnytsia, in central Ukraine.
The two hadn’t spoken for a few months. They first met on the freelance-connections website Upwork in 2019 when Barbieri sought help for a tech project.
