The Zelensky government’s “state in a smartphone” model of digital identity and governance, once a source of pride and inspiration for other countries, has become a source of derision.
Regular NC readers are by now no strangers to Ukraine’s “state-of-the-art” Diia (Ukrainian for “action”) digital governance and identity system. For those who are, a quick recap: In December 2022, we reported that Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky government was trying to digitise just about everything it could, including most government services and bureaucracy, even against a backdrop of war, rolling blackouts and internet outages:
Ukraine may be suffering a rising wave of rolling power blackouts and internet outages as the proxy war between Russia and NATO intensifies, but that doesn’t seem to have crimped the Zelensky government’s ambitions to transform the country into a digital wonderland. In the past week alone, Ukraine’s central bank unveiled plans for a digital E-hryvnia and Kyiv signed a digital trade agreement (yep, they do exist) with the United Kingdom.
USAID Funding
In January 2023, Samantha Power, speaking at Davos, the then administrator of Washington’s soft power arm, USAID, heralded Diia as “a great anti-corruption tool” and unveiled US government plans to replicate the “success” of Ukraine’s e-governance app in other countries around the world — including, presumably, the United States itself. As the promotional video below shows, Diia was developed “with support from USAID”.
Ukraine’s digitisation of government services predated the conflict with Russia, but in the eternal spirit of never letting a good crisis go to waste, it was significantly expanded once the hostilities began.
The purpose of Diia was not just to digitise public services but to automate, outsource and privatise them, as Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation and Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov Fedorov told the WEF’s 2021 class of Young Global Leaders, of which he is a graduate:
The Government needs to become as flexible and mobile as an IT company, to automate all functions and services, significantly change the structure, reduce 60% of officials, introduce large-scale privatisation and outsourcing of government functions. Even in customs. Only such a Government will be able to bring about quick and bold reforms to rebuild the country and ensure rapid development.
Then, in May 2023 we picked apart a shamelessly gushing article by the United Nations Development Programme, another financial backer of Diia, about Ukraine’s accelerating war-time digital transformation:
Despite being plunged into war, Ukraine is forging ahead with a comprehensive re-think of how business is conducted, and how Ukrainian people interact with each other and with their government.
“We are building the most convenient digital state in the world — without corruption, without bureaucracy, absolutely paperless, and open for everyone,” Ms. Ionan [Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation] says.
The online portal and a mobile application for public services is called Diia, which is Ukrainian for ‘action’.
It aims to move all public services online, cover the entire country with internet access, close the gender and generational gaps in digital literacy, and make Ukraine the most welcoming country in the world for IT companies.
Inconvenient Consequences
That dream has withered already. Ukraine cannot muster much of a welcome for IT companies given that not only is it on the verge of losing its NATO-led proxy war against Russia while also suffering regular nationwide blackouts but large parts of its Diia system are down after being hit by a massive Russian cyber attack in early December. It is as yet unclear how much of the data held on the system has been compromised. But needless to say, the consequences for Ukrainian citizens appears to be anything but convenient, as Kyiv Independent reports:
At the start of December, Ukrainians suddenly found themselves unable to sell cars, file legal claims, or register marriages through the state’s recently digitized government registries.
The Justice Ministry on Dec. 19 formally announced that a Russian hack had taken a laundry list of critical government databases that had been put under the Justice Ministry offline. The databases contain sensitive information from property ownership to biometric data to tax records.
Relevant Ukrainian offices quickly called it an act of war from Russia. “The information space is one of the key directions of the enemy’s attacks,” wrote the State Communications Service, the national cybersecurity agency, in a statement provided to the Kyiv Independent…
XakNet, a hacking group previously tied to Russian intelligence, took credit for the attack, posting on Telegram data they claim to have hacked from the Ukrainian civil registry. The hackers claimed to have deleted at least some of the registry data…
XakNet hackers also claimed to have destroyed backup data in servers in Poland. In its message the hacker group mocks Ukraine’s government, saying: “It’s very telling to store government data on foreign storage — that’s what independence Ukrainian-style looks like, apparently.”
A December 20 article published byy ownership services, vehicle re-registration, “eRestoration,” “eHousing,” and many others.”
Given the Zelensky government’s ambition to do away with all old-f RBC-Ukraine suggests the scale of the fallout is significant: “over 20 services in the Diia app are temporarily unavailable, including worker reservations, business registration, online marriage registrations, propertashioned, paper-based bureaucracy in its mad rush to create the perfect paperless state, it would be interesting to know whether it left in place analogue backups for these bureaucratic processes.
Ukraine’s Justice Ministry recently insisted that all of its state registries were ready to operate but that access to some registers was still limited, as their data still needs to be updated. Access to government services through the Diia app would be available in the near future, it said on Jan. 20 — over six weeks after the initial cyber attack. On January 23, UNN reported that it is now once again possible to obtain a preferential mortgage and change your place of residence online through the Diia app.
“We are working to restore all services in the app and on the portal,” said Fedorov.
Crumbling Public Trust
But the hack is likely to further undermine public trust in the Zelensky government. As even the New York Times reported recently, the high popularity that the Ukrainian president enjoyed in the early days of the Russian invasion, with an approval rating of about 90 percent, has dipped badly in recent months. Of course, given that Zelenksy’s government has cancelled elections for as long as the war goes on, this doesn’t matter much.
But Ukraine’s reputation as a pioneer in digital governance is also under fire. For the first time since the Diia system’s launch in February 2020, media in the country and abroad are beginning to question the wisdom of digitising government services so quickly and then centralising the system and data into a single digital portal under the control of just one government department, the Ministry of Justice. What was once a source of pride for the government is fast becoming a source of derision.
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Nick Corbishley 