Frag Out! Magazine
Issue link: https://fragout.uberflip.com/i/1542142
post was taken by a young programmer, Mykhailo Fedorov, who built a team from scratch of people from the same milieu. This is a young generation of Ukrainians who generally had little previous contact with state bureaucracy. Thanks to this team's efforts, the process of digitally transforming public services progressed in subsequent years. The Diia app appeared, a highly developed equivalent of Poland's mObywatel. Over time more and more services moved into the digital sphere, reducing bureaucratic procedures and limiting corruption at lower levels by reducing face-to-face contact between officials and citizens. This process began later in Ukraine than in Poland, but it proceeded rapidly and with much greater dynamics. Against the backdrop of failures in many other sectors, digital transformation became one of the few success stories for President Zelensky, something openly perceived positively by voters, so over time the Ministry of Digital Transformation gained increasing influence and greater freedom of action within Zelensky's system of power. Fedorov retained his position despite multiple reshuffles in virtually every other Ukrainian ministry. It is this environment and the Ministry's team, supported by society, that in recent years have been the source of reforms regarding digital transformation in the military and the defense industry of Ukraine. The factors mentioned in Part 1 overlap here with the development of the IT sector as a foundation for further change in the state and the military. The class of young programmers on the one hand join the military as volunteers and through mobilization and on the other support the military and pro-defense foundations. At the same time this milieu penetrates the system of power and reforms the army from above. Naturally, they transfer their civilian sector experience to the military and often gain full freedom to experiment and implement changes for political reasons from state authorities. PART 3. CHANGES IN 2014–2022 Many of the solutions commonly used in the Ukrainian military in 2025 were in reality created before the full-scale invasion, although at that stage their implementation was patchy. Command largely turned a blind eye to this "bottom- up digital transformation" in the military rather than actively encouraging it. Reforms in the AFU in 2014–2022 focused more on expanding the army's structures and improving individual soldiers' service conditions than on reforming the management system of the army's logistics and front-line units. At the same time, during the active phase of the Donbas war in 2014–2015 Ukrainian forces encountered the use of reconnaissance drones by the Russian side. Because the Ukrainian Armed Forces possessed only outdated Soviet weaponry, grassroots solutions emerged that could simply increase the accuracy of fire for artillery or tanks — systems such as Kropyva or Armor. In those years there were many similar systems ANALYSIS