War is reshaping the Ukrainian state—for the better

livemint.com:

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war When Russian tanks began bearing down on Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, in February of last year, Mykhailo Fedorov was overseeing improvements to an app that provides Ukrainians with easy access to government services. At the time the app focused on fairly conventional tasks: filing tax returns, obtaining business permits, claiming benefits and so on. But the 32-year-old Mr Fedorov and his colleagues quickly added extra features.

Now DIIA (the Ukrainian for “action" and also an acronym for “the State and Me") allows patriots to donate to the war effort, struggling businesses to apply for state support and ordinary citizens to report Russian troop movements. And with the war making it hard for people to visit government offices, the ability to conduct official business online has become a godsend for many. When Volodymyr Zelensky became Ukraine’s president in 2019, he promised to modernise a state that until then had been a byword for bureaucracy and corruption.

DiIa, launched in 2020, was the centrepiece of this effort. But what began as a means to mollify exasperated voters quickly became part of Ukraine’s struggle for survival. To beat back the Russian onslaught and keep the government functioning, the state has had no choice but to become vastly more nimble and effective.

The young, tech-savvy Ukrainians leading this overhaul see it not just as a necessity, but also as an opportunity. “We call it Ukraine 2.0. We all loved Ukraine as we knew it, but there were a lot of things in it which we don’t want to bring into a new one.