A bomb can destroy your house. Ukraine’s digital government can still prove it was yours.

WASHINGTON — Governments around the world are trying to figure out how artificial intelligence will change the way they operate — and Ukraine has been on the forefront of that development out of necessity.

Nearly five years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine has been forced to rapidly digitize government services, experiment with artificial intelligence and build infrastructure capable of keeping a modern state functioning even while the physical systems underneath it are under attack.

Now Kyiv wants other countries to learn from the experience.

Ukrainian Minister of Digital Transformation Oksana Ferchuk was in Washington this week for meetings with U.S. government officials and major technology companies as Ukraine looks to deepen cooperation on AI, digital infrastructure and the technology ecosystem that has developed during the war.

Ferchuk met with officials from the State and Commerce departments, as well as companies such as Visa, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon, Ferchuk told The Correspondent.

The pitch comes at a prime moment in Washington. President Trump this week announced a voluntary AI (Sorry, “SI”) safety agreement with several major technology companies while the administration also rolled out America.gov, an AI-powered effort to make federal government services easier to navigate.

Ukraine, meanwhile, is already several steps into that experiment.

Its Diia digital-government platform gives Ukrainians access to roughly 250 public services online, while its mobile app is used by more than 24 million people. Ukrainians can access identification documents, pay fines, sell a car, register government information and even marry or divorce through the system.

Ukraine has also begun layering artificial intelligence directly onto those services.

Diia.AI allows Ukrainians to request government services through a conversational AI assistant rather than navigating the bureaucracy themselves.

The system can already perform tasks like obtaining income certificates, while Kyiv is working to expand AI across public administration, education, health care and other government functions.

The transformation did not begin with the war. Ukraine created its Ministry of Digital Transformation in 2019 and had already begun aggressively moving government functions online before Russian forces launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022.

But war dramatically changed the timetable.

“Digitization as security”

Services once treated as conveniences suddenly became part of the country’s resilience: Ukrainians evacuated from their homes, serving on the front or living abroad still needed access to government documents and services even when government buildings were inaccessible — or destroyed.

That pressure has forced Ukraine to move faster than governments normally do — accepting that technological systems will have to be developed, tested and improved while they are already being used.

“Digitization as security,” Ferchuk called it.

In Ukraine, AI is not about convenience; it’s become a necessity.

I’ve visited refugee centers in eastern Ukraine where — nearly five years into the war — people continue to arrive after evacuating threatened areas. They leave home with little more than what they can carry.

“When people evacuate, they may leave with nothing but their phone,” Ferchuk said. “Their passport, birth certificate and property documents can still be with them.”

The system has also helped Ukrainians prove what they lost.

A person fleeing an occupied or devastated area may no longer have the physical deed to a house — or a house at all. But the government still has the digital property record and can use technology including satellite imagery to verify the destruction and process compensation claims, Ferchuk said.

“A Russian missile can destroy your house and the documents inside it, but it cannot erase the digital record showing that the house belonged to you,” she said.

Now Ukraine wants to build on what it has learned during the war — and American tech companies are part of the plan.

Ferchuk is in Washington this week meeting with U.S. officials and some of the biggest names in American technology.

Meetings with Visa, Meta and Microsoft were also on the agenda.

“We want partnerships that combine the capabilities of these companies with what Ukraine has learned under extraordinary conditions,” Ferchuk said.

“Ukraine can be a proving ground for new technology,” she added.

That is a pitch Ukraine is uniquely positioned to make. Technologies that other governments are still debating or slowly rolling out are being put to work in a country where infrastructure is routinely under Russian attack and millions of people have been displaced.

Russia targets the digital state

But Moscow has increasingly put Kyiv’s digital infrastructure in its sights.

Russian attacks have damaged Ukrainian telecommunications infrastructure and data centers throughout the war, Ferchuk said, including dozens of telecom and data-center locations.

Ukraine has responded by spreading critical infrastructure across different locations and cloud providers and, in some cases, moving it underground.

The goal is straightforward: A Russian strike on one building cannot be allowed to take government services down with it.

So far, Ukraine’s core digital services have remained online.

That experience is likely to matter well beyond Ukraine as governments move identification documents, financial information, health records and other essential services online — and increasingly incorporate AI into the systems managing them.

Ukraine is already dealing with the security problem that comes with it.

For Kyiv, keeping a government app running is no longer just an IT issue. It is part of keeping the country functioning during a war.

American companies bring advanced AI, cloud computing and data capabilities.

Ukraine brings something considerably more difficult to replicate: a live testing environment where technology has to work despite cyberattacks, missile strikes, damaged infrastructure and a population repeatedly forced to move.

Ukraine has already played that role in military technology, particularly with drones, electronic warfare and battlefield software.

Ferchuk wants the country’s civilian technology sector to benefit from the same rapid cycle of development, and some of the most consequential examples are not particularly futuristic.

For a Ukrainian fleeing an occupied town, the important technology may be a passport that cannot be left behind.

For a family whose home was destroyed, it may be a property record that survived the house.

And for a government trying to operate while Russia targets the infrastructure underneath it, keeping those records accessible has become its own form of defense.