Starting Leg 2 with a bang - Literally

Personal reflections from my time in Kyiv, Ukraine

Well, I am back on the road, which means these newsletters will probably come out a bit more sporadically as I find pockets of time to write them.

I am writing this one on the train from Kyiv to Warsaw. I am also going to deviate from my usual format and write it more like a personal travel journal. I hope you don’t mind. I think it fits what I want to say better.

I thought I would start this leg with a bang — literally, as it turned out — and go to Ukraine.

Many people told me I was crazy to go to a war zone. How right they turned out to be. But honestly, I would be crazy not to go. You can’t talk about exploring the future of government and not go to Ukraine. In the last five years, Ukraine has skyrocketed from 102nd to 5th in the UN e-government rankings — basically pulling a reverse Canada, but on steroids.

How? What is happening in Ukraine?

I had to go find out. Thankfully, I had lots of friends to help.

But how does one travel to a war zone?

I decided to vlog the journey on the new Civic Punks Instagram.

First, you need special insurance. Normal travel insurance does not cover war zones. Luckily, the Ukrainian government is eager to help, though I lost count of how many messages I received along the way telling me that travel to Ukraine was not recommended.

Next, you can’t fly there. The airspace is closed. So you fly into Warsaw and then take an overnight train in. It was my first time on a sleeper train.

Turns out, I was the only non-Ukrainian on the train into Kyiv. Then the train broke down for ten hours, causing me to miss my first day of meetings.

I finally arrived on the evening of Monday, June 1st, into the warm embrace of my friend and host, Luke Cavanagh, who had come to meet me at the train station. Luke works for the Tony Blair Institute in Kyiv. He also runs Interweave, a great newsletter on digital government transformation, and organizes GovMesh, a regular retreat for digital government leaders, with my Singapore host, Yogesh. The eagle-eyed Civic Punk might also recognize Luke as the Europe rep on my Global Government Innovation Panel.

Luke and one of his housemates, Adrian, a war correspondent for CBS, then gave me the pep talk about what to expect living through a war zone.

That turned out to be useful, because Monday night was particularly violent.

We were woken up at 2 a.m. by a loud explosion not far from us. The guidance is to make your way to the closest bomb shelter, which for us was the local subway station around the corner. But like most Ukrainians, we instead moved to the centre of the building, to a room with no windows.

Higher risk, yes. But also more convenient. And when this happens often, convenience eventually wins out.

Luke quickly pulled up a Telegram channel run by the Ukrainian military, which gives detailed breakdowns of what to expect. They have enough surveillance and sensors to tell what is on its way to Kyiv. Luckily, our neighbourhood was not a target, but the missiles kept falling across the city, each explosion echoing through the city.

It was terrifying. There is also a strange camaraderie in huddling together, praying your building does not get hit, while doom-scrolling Telegram channels for updates.

After the missiles came the drones, with their distinct buzzing, far more ominous than the recreational drones back home. Then came the rat-tat-tat of anti-aircraft guns spaced across the city, followed by explosions as drones either hit their mark or were taken out.

Needless to say, none of us got much sleep.

The next morning, the sun rose, and it was a beautiful day, as if the night before had never happened. Even though more than 30 people had died in the attack.

But I am not a war correspondent. I went to Ukraine to explore the future of government that they are building.

First on my list was Kateryna Frovalov, the head of the Global Government Technology Centre – Kyiv. GGTC-Kyiv is part of a World Economic Forum-supported global network focused on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is a lot of fancy words for a network of organizations laying the groundwork for the future economy and society. I had already met the heads of the Malaysian and German leads earlier in my travels, so I was excited to see what the Kyiv office was building.

When I met Kateryna, I was exhausted from not getting much sleep. But then again, we were all in the same boat. It became the opening check-in for every meeting that day: How was your night? Rough one, eh? Glad you are safe.

The Kyiv office is doing lots of interesting work, but we focused mostly on their new innovation lab. The goal is to bring together entrepreneurs, startups, and governments to solve social problems creatively.

Politicians everywhere talk about supporting small and medium-sized local businesses, but this rarely moves beyond election-speak. The reality is that it is really hard for governments and entrepreneurs to work together. Small organizations can struggle to deliver reliably. Governments can struggle to follow through on commitments. And procurement rules often get in the way before anyone even starts.

I asked Kateryna about this. She acknowledged that procurement had been their biggest hurdle as well, but said they were finding creative ways to work within the rules that already existed. She also emphasized the importance of having the problem owner in the room from the start, already bought into the project. The failure to scale pilots is one of the biggest critiques of government innovation labs. That buy-in is key to overcoming it.

The project is still in its early days, so the real test is yet to come. Still, it shows a lot of promise. One reason is a uniquely Ukrainian thing: they are at war, so there is a strong drive to make this work.

My next meeting was with the CIO for the City of Kyiv. I had time, so I decided to make the one-hour walk between locations and see more of the city.

Quite by chance, I turned a corner and found myself facing complete devastation.

I had stumbled onto the site of one of the major attacks from the night before. Several buildings were bombed out. Glass and debris were everywhere. Cars were crushed, their tires blown. Basically every window in the area was shattered.

To my surprise, the street was full of people, especially given that the air sirens were going off and my alert app was warning me of impending drone strikes. Still, people seemed to be walking around as if it were any other day. Some were taking pictures. Others were taking in the scene. Tents had been set up to support people whose homes had been damaged in the blast.

Then I heard the buzzing of a drone.

At first, people kept walking as if it were nothing. Then it got closer. All of a sudden, people started running for cover. I followed them inside. Just as I entered the doorway of a nearby building, the drone struck the building across the road with a loud blast. The shockwave pushed me through the doorway.

Holy shit, that was close.

Inside, the building was full of people. Many were crying. Kids were huddled up with their mum.

The human toll of this war came sharply into focus. No one should have to live like this. War is an awful abomination of human power. Why we do this to each other? I will never understand.

I eventually made it to my meeting with the CIO for the City of Kyiv, Victoria Itskovych. Victoria is a big fan of F1 and gaming, which is clear from her office decorations. She told me the story of the early days of the war, and it read like a nerdy government adventure novel.

On the night of the first attack, she immediately got dressed and headed not to the office, but to the data centre. I asked her why, and she said she figured that was where she could do the most good.

It ended up being six weeks before she and her team slept in their own beds. Instead, they camped out at the data centre, air mattresses everywhere, working through the night week after week.

So often, the story of Ukraine is one of a government being forced by war to take an archaic system and rapidly turn it into one of the most advanced digital governments in the world. That may be the story of the national government, but it is not the story Victoria told me about the City of Kyiv.

Before the war, Kyiv already had a fairly robust and trusted app — she emphasized trusted — used by more than a million people. At the time, it was mainly used for parking and transit.

In the first week of the war, they quickly repurposed it for the emergency. The city had an aging Soviet-era air siren system that was not fit for the present war, so they created a digital warning system — the one I would use during my trip — that gave live updates to people wherever they were. Then came shelters: an interactive tool to help people find the closest place of safety.

After a week, they realized the data centre, sitting in a government building, was likely an obvious target. So under the cover of night, they moved the most important parts of it to an underground parking garage. Something that would usually take weeks, if not months, of careful planning was done in a wild couple of hours, using people’s cars and whatever else they could get their hands on.

The lesson is simple: when you already have a robust and trusted digital system in place, you can pivot much more quickly in a crisis. In Kyiv, that literally saved lives.

That evening, I hosted a Civic Punks social. It was a chance to meet a bunch of civic punks in Kyiv.

It is amazing that, in the middle of a war, you can still have a thriving nightlife. We sat on a patio at a trendy bar called Squat 17B. I may as well have been in Berlin or Paris.

I noticed a pattern among the people there. Many had been working in the private sector, living abroad, in careers with real promise and upward mobility. When the war started, they left those comfortable lives to come home and be part of the defence effort.

There was a deep sense of patriotism and civic duty that any country would dream of having. A steely resolve to face the threat and come out stronger. These people could leave for safety. They chose to stay.

Afterward, my friend Denys Nazarenko, who is a senior advisor to the CIO of Kyiv and helped set up the meeting with Victoria, took me on a tour of the city. I was exhausted and therefore a bit grouchy — sorry, Denys. But even in that state, it was impossible not to see the beauty of Kyiv, a city rich in history and architecture, two things I absolutely love.

Tuesday night was mercifully quiet. Still, despite my exhaustion, I slept restlessly. Every little noise woke me up. I imagined more missiles landing.

War traumatizes you. It is a heavy weight that sits on your chest, even when you are only visiting for a couple of days. You never feel safe.

I experienced this for two days. The people here have carried it for years.

The next morning, I managed to secure a meeting with the new head of AI for the government of Ukraine, Roman Kyslyi. Ukraine is leading the charge on the Agentic State — basically redesigning government around AI agents — so I was particularly excited for this discussion.

Over the last few years, Ukraine has built an incredible cohort of people who have driven its digital transformation under the leadership of Mykhailo Fedorov at the Ministry of Digital Transformation. A few months ago, Fedorov moved to Defence and brought many of this cohort with him. It has paid immediate dividends and is likely one of the reasons for Ukraine’s recent success on the battlefield. But it has also left a big gap at the ministry, now being filled by a new cohort. Roman is part of that group.

He has a deep background in AI and is part of a community focused on Ukrainian AI sovereignty. They started by trying to solve the lack of Ukrainian language and culture in the data that AI models were being trained on. Over time, as AI increasingly becomes the lens through which we make sense of the world, this can erode culture and identity. The Singaporeans call this a risk to cognitive sovereignty.

Digital sovereignty more broadly has become a hot topic, as the world wakes up to the reality that most digital infrastructure is run and managed by American companies, and that the U.S. government is increasingly willing to use this leverage over other countries. This creates a major risk. But it is also a hard problem to fix.

I had a conversation with fellow Canadian David Eaves about this last fall. David is one of the world’s leading thinkers on the subject. As he told me while we walked in circles around the park outside his office at University College London, this infrastructure has been built over decades with billions (maybe trillions) of dollars of investment, the world’s leading experts, a ton of data centres, and enormous amounts of energy.

There is no country, aside from maybe the European Union (maybe) that is even close to replicating this.

So I put the question to Roman: what does AI sovereignty look like when the underlying infrastructure is so hard to recreate?

His answer had two parts.

First, lean into open source. Public code can be shared, improved, and reused by people around the world. Many of us in the tech and digital transformation space have long advocated for open source, particularly in government. Public dollars should go toward public assets.

Second, as we move from LLMs — the AI chatbots we are all used to, like ChatGPT — to AI agents, the scope becomes more focused. You only need the data related to the task you want the agent to do. That becomes much more manageable.

This is really interesting, though I still think it leaves a lot of the digital sovereignty questions outstanding.

Roman went further. He sees a future where each of us carries our own unique context in data that sits on our phone and computer. That becomes the base for our own personal AI agent to work from.

Afterward, I took some time to walk around the city, including a sobering visit to Independence Square, with its massive memorial to all the people who have sacrificed their lives in the war.

Then I met Daryna Varenyk. Daryna represents the future of Ukraine.

Her core passion is getting young people excited to work in government, a passion I share. She is launching a podcast that pairs a young person — say someone studying AI — with someone who has been working in the field for a long time, like Roman. The podcast is a recording of their conversation.

Brilliant model. I am really excited to listen to it. It will be in Ukrainian, so I will need to figure out some way to translate it. But hey, that is what technology is for.

Her day job is with the Better Regulation Delivery Office, or BRDO. This organization was created to solve a problem governments everywhere have: it is really hard to hire the top talent you need. Government pay often cannot compete with the private sector, and the hiring process is long and labour-intensive.

Effectively, BRDO functions like a consulting firm that specializes in government. But where many consulting firms are extractive, building relationships of dependency that keep governments coming back (Mariana Mazzucato wrote a whole book about this dynamic called The Big Con) BRDO works to build capacity.

It is effectively a pan-government body, sitting outside the usual hiring rules but close enough to meet the need. I would argue that fixing the hiring rules is the ultimate solution, but this is a good workaround in a crisis.

Still, it points to a pattern I see a lot: instead of fixing the rules that create problems in government — procurement, hiring, or otherwise — we build workarounds outside of government because changing the rules feels too hard.

The trip was less than 48 hours, but it packed a lot. So what did I take away?

This might be my Mennonite roots talking, but war is awful. Just awful. I would argue it is almost never justified. It makes monsters of us all and causes incredible suffering, and for what?

The deep fear on the faces of the people in that building is imprinted on my mind, matched by my own terror in that moment.

Everyone I met has been personally affected by the war. Many have lost family and friends. On the train ride in, one of my cabin mates told me in graphic detail about the torture her boyfriend experienced after being captured while fighting on the front lines. She herself had left a cushy job with Accenture in Austria to do her part for the war effort, working in military tech.

This country is full of people with incredible resilience and determination. But as Kateryna was quick to point out, she is tired of people saying this.

“We are just human. And we are tired. Tired of all of this.”

I came to Ukraine looking for the future of government. In a whirlwind 48 hours, I left changed in ways I did not expect. I was moved at levels I did not know I could be.

I will be back. Hopefully when the war is over, to help capture the rebirth of an incredible country with a deep and beautiful soul.

Next stop, a taste of the familiar - London.