Ukraine Eyes High-Tech Export Push, Touts Wartime Digital Resilience

Ukraine intends to convert its wartime experience in military technology and digital innovation into a sharp expansion of high-tech exports in the coming years, the country's minister for digital transformation has said during a visit to Washington.

Oksana Ferchuk said Kyiv is exploring cooperation agreements with the United States, other governments and international institutions, built on its record of keeping digital services running through the war with Russia, 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," Ferchuk said, adding that the country is ready to advise other states on how the effort was designed, analysed and architected.

Ferchuk, who previously led digital transformation at the defence ministry, is meeting US economic, cybersecurity and telecommunications officials this week, along with senior World Bank leaders.

She said Ukraine has already become a testing ground for the newest weaponry and is helping other countries build drone defences, and could extend that role to non-military sectors by folding in artificial intelligence.

"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, arguing that lower costs and faster innovation have allowed Kyiv to unsettle a global military technology sector that generally moves more slowly.

Ferchuk is pitching the US, the European Union and others on digital cooperation projects, and warned that companies or countries that skip investment in Ukraine risk missing the transformation of new sectors.

On infrastructure, she said Ukraine is relocating data centres and other facilities underground as Russian strikes on such sites have intensified in recent months. Redundancies across locations and cloud providers have helped keep services online, she said.

"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," Ferchuk said, adding that while the attacks have been painful, services have not been significantly disrupted.

She said World Bank officials she met in Kyiv showed strong interest in Ukraine's digital tools, including platforms for education, telecommunications and social services, with further discussions planned during her Washington visit.