Ukraine sets its sights on boosting high-tech exports, hails digital resilience

WASHINGTON, Sept 29 : Ukraine aims to leverage its expertise in military technologies and digital innovation to sharply increase high-tech exports in coming years, including through the use of AI, the country's minister for digital transformation told Reuters on Tuesday.

Oksana Ferchuk said Ukraine was exploring cooperation agreements with the US, other countries and international institutions, drawing on its experiences maintaining digital services during the war against Russia's invasion, now in its fifth year.

"Ukraine during the war showed this tremendous speed of digitizing the state services and providing the services to the population in a digital way," said Ferchuk, who traveled to Washington this week to meet with US economic, cybersecurity and telecommunications officials, as well as senior leaders at the World Bank. "We are ready to cooperate and consult other states in this experience, how it was done, how it was analyzed, what is the architecture."

Ukraine, which has become a test bed for the newest weaponry during the war, is already helping other countries build their drone defenses, but could do the same in non-military sectors, while incorporating AI technologies, said Ferchuk, who previously oversaw digital transformation at the defense ministry.

"Military technologies now can speed up development in the high-tech segment, and we just have to ignite it and to give the right regulation to make it happen," she said. "The technology is developing so fast that I would like to repeat this in civil use and show that by missing investment into Ukraine, the companies or countries will miss transformation of new sectors."

Cheaper products and quicker innovation have allowed Kyiv to disrupt the generally slower-moving global military technology sector, said Ferchuk, who is pitching the US, European Union and others on cooperation projects in the digital realm.

She said Ukraine was moving data centers and infrastructure underground in the wake of increasing Russian strikes on such facilities in recent months, but stressed that built-in redundancies in locations and cloud providers had helped keep digital services functioning despite Russian strikes.

"We already have some type of destroyed infrastructure for dozens of our telecom and data center locations, but the digital services are alive and running, and this is a result of our tremendous efforts to achieve this resilience," she said.

While the Russian attacks had been painful, services had not been significantly disrupted, she said.   

Ferchuk said she had already met with World Bank officials in Kyiv and they were very interested in Ukraine's digital tools, including platforms for education, telecommunications and social services. Further discussions were planned this week.