Tatiana Butanka

Tatiana Butanka is an activist and one of the visible representatives of Montelibero, a libertarian intentional community and crypto-oriented free-society movement in Montenegro. With a background in IT, sales and marketing, she helps organise the community’s events and projects.

Montelibero began in December 2020, when a libertarian couple left Kyiv for Montenegro and were joined within months by others from across the Russian-speaking world. It asks members to hold to the non-aggression principle rather than to any party or programme, and it runs its common purse through the MTL token, which works as a share in the fund that buys the land and pays for what gets built on it.

Butanka bought a plot at MTL City herself, which is the part of the project that separates it from an online community. The land is real, the money is pooled, and the decisions about both are taken by the people who put it in.

She presented the project at the Liberty in Our Lifetime conference in Prague in 2023 and has talked through the practicalities on the Free Cities Podcast, including what it actually takes for a foreigner to buy land in Montenegro. Her reason for choosing the country is not ideological: she describes it as unusually open to newcomers and willing to try things, which for a settlement of this size counts for more than any constitutional argument.