He soon founded a nonprofit social network for entrepreneurs called Mesto — the Russian word for place — hoping to boost the start-up market in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. As he launched a new start-up of his own, Duplicat, which aimed to identify fraud in the market for nonfungible tokens, he contracted with a team of artificial intelligence engineers spread across Russia.He also invested in several Ukrainian start-ups. One of them was Reface, an A.I. company recommended by Mr. Podolyanko. Last summer, as they met with other companies and colleagues in Kyiv, the two of them attended a boat party whose hosts were a gro …
