On with Kara Swisher - Ukraine’s Tech Advantage

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

Today, Kara talks to USAID Administrator Samantha Power and Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Information Mykhailo Fedorov about the role of tech in the war, and the power of an app called Diia. Among its capabilities: accessing medical information, filing claims for war damage to property and helping track Russian troop movements.  Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on Instagram. We’re @karaswisher and @nayeemaraza. BTW, do you have any burning questions on career, love or life you’d like Kara or Nayeema’s advice on? If so, call 1-888-KARA-PLZ and leave us a voice mail. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees, and it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer.

Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Support for this podcast comes from Anthropic. It's not always easy to harness the power and potential of AI. For all the talk around its revolutionary potential, a lot of AI systems feel like they're designed for specific tasks performed by a select few. Well, Claude by Anthropic is AI for everyone. The latest model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, offers groundbreaking intelligence at an everyday price.

Claude Sonnet can generate code, help with writing, and reason through hard problems better than any model before. You can discover how Clalawed can transform your business at anthropic.com slash clawed. Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Vladimir Putin, It is over. Can we do one episode where there's no mention of Elon Musk? No, no, no. Never? No, because he just did the Neuralink approval, allegedly. No, no, he was in the news this week. Oh, I'm so over Elon. Anyways, Putin.

Let's speak about Putin. By the way, I mean, remember when Elon was being so cozy up with Putin's policy on Twitter? No, but I mean early on, and you were like, it's okay. He just has an opinion. It's fine. Wow. Now, we'll see how the long tables have. He just has an opinion. It's fine. Wow. Now, we'll see how the long tables have turned. I think he's helped Ukraine a lot.

I think they think that, too, in this case. But go ahead. What a good guy. Yeah. I think he helps Elon. Yeah, that's true. Anyways, speaking of this war, we have a panel today with two people, Mikhail Fedorov, who's the Ukrainian vice prime minister and the minister for digital transformation, as well as Samantha Power, who's the USAID administrator and the former ambassador to the UN under President Obama.

Yes, we did a live event at the Warner Theater in Washington, D.C. It was touting an effort that the U.S. government is making with Ukraine around this app that they have that started out as just like a government online app and is, you know, transformed into something else because of the war going on. And before we get to that panel and the DIA app, let's start with just a quick lay of the land. It's been over a year, I think 15 months, since Russia invaded Ukraine. Since then, the Russians have captured five or six cities, including the small city of Bakhmut that mercenaries are just transitioning over to the Russian military right now. The UN estimates that 9,000 Ukrainian civilians have died in the war, and then there's tens of thousands of soldiers who have died on each side. And the fighting has no signs of ending anytime soon. And U.S. and NATO keep increasing

their support, $45 billion of U.S. military aid, $70 billion of NATO aid, and then fighter jets are going too. It's basically crawling as close to the line of alliance without entering a third world war. Yes, they're not stopping until the Russians get out, and the Russians aren't going to get out. I think eventually it will be negotiated, but I'm not an expert in this, but I think it could go on for a while until there is some sort of rapprochement between them. So recently there's been drone strikes in this war, an attack on the Kremlin that Ukrainians actually pulled off. It was not a false flag attack as many had speculated. And tech has played a

really important part of this war. When we started covering it a year ago on our old pod, we started with Clint Watts, a tech expert, talking about how the internet was going to really splinter. Yeah. I mean, I think what's interesting is the Ukraine has been sort of the way the Russians have tested all their misinformation stuff, and they thought they had softened up the country in that regard. So I think they've been surprised by how much resistance there is. I think they thought they had done a really good job threatening them and also trying to mess their systems up. But it was a lot of it was cyber warfare from very early on. And Ukraine has been very good at bringing their technology up to speed in ways that I think will benefit them when this is over. I think they'll have a very vibrant tech industry, a little like Israel, if you think about it. And so I think it's been an important player, whether it's the drones, whether it's Starlink and targeting Russians, whether it's jamming communications or following communications. You know, every war is technical, right? Weapons are technical.

But this is really using digital means and AI and different things to try to figure out where things are going and where people are and to locate them. And at one point, they were locating Russians through their cell phones, right? And then killing them, including generals. And so it's been a critical part of a smaller country. It used to be guerrilla warfare. This is cyber guerrilla warfare. And then there's also the media warfare, the Hearts and Mind campaign, which has been turning off the Internet.

Russia kind of denying access to outside press, many cases trying to clamp down on Russian press, as they are anyways inclined to. And, of course, the very important thing that's playing out here as well is a media narrative. And there's a very different media narrative happening outside of the United States and the West and Europe that we don't see as much. And that is around the solidarity of like Russian and Chinese alliances versus American alliances. We see a certain narrative of this war. And around the world, they might see more of this Putin narrative, that this is a battle for against a kind of single hegemon, the U.S. world order. This is a move towards multipolar alliances. And a lot of these countries, like you saw Zelensky snubbing Lula da Silva

because Brazil has not come out to support Ukraine. You see countries really being tested and the system of alliances really shifting into what I think the Russians and the Chinese hope will be some kind of new world order. You know, the hearts and minds stuff is very important here. And the Russians have done the same. And the Chinese are certainly posturing. One of the things that's important is to have a very robust online strategy here, just as you would a weapons strategy.

Obviously, weapons are more important and boots on the ground. But certainly, all kinds of technical issues have played a much bigger part. And I think they've called it that. The Ukrainians have said this is the first digital war, really. And I would agree. I would say so. So Fedorov and Power were in D.C. to promote the work they've done together to create this app called Dia.

So explain what the app is and the presentation you saw right before the interview. He was showing off this app that was used for, they have a lot of corruption in Ukraine, very well known before this war. And so they were trying to do things where they allowed people to talk directly to government or things were approved. So there wasn't a human. They kept saying, we don't want a human in the middle so they can get bribes and things like that. It's a bigger problem in some countries than others. And so they were using this app where people could have their passport, they could do construction permit, all kinds of stuff. And they've added feature after feature.

And this is, e-government is a big deal around the world. Everyone's way ahead of the U.S. on this issue. Yeah. Well, e-government, I mean, it's like, just look at the vaccine rollout here, the fact that we don't have digital vaccine cards. And I mean, it comes down to the U.S. kind of the orientation towards government, which is that there's a concern about government having your data. And so e-government has become very hard in this country versus like India, Pakistan, places that people have national ID numbers. I always find it remarkable. Like we don't want CCTV to help protect our streets, but we're very happy to have Amazon Echo and everything in our homes listening to our every word. We like private companies to spy on us rather than the government,

but they also wanted to show off that they were sort of the new forward-leaning government under Zelensky. And so Dia started off as just e-government. Now you can report Russian troops, all kinds of things. If your buildings were damaged, you can upload pictures. It's going to be of great use when this is over for sure, not just for insurance and rebuilding, but also war crimes and things like that. Yeah. It's really crowdsourcing information on the atrocities, and that gives you coverage that you wouldn't be able to have just through military surveillance. You actually have on-the-ground eyes through citizen participation and trust in this app.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's a pretty cool app. But it started off kind of just anodyne, and now it's really an important... Pretty cool app used in pretty terrible times. Times, that's correct. That's correct. But eventually they'll make it into something bigger, and maybe they'll open source it all over the world. It'd be kind of interesting for them to, they need to do things after this is over and tech is going to be a big deal in Ukraine

when this is over, I think. Let's take a quick break and we'll be back with the interview with Vice Minister Fedorov and Administrator Power. And we should mention that Fedorov will be using translation, so you'll hear a bit of his answer in Ukrainian, followed by the interpreter in English. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night.

And honestly, that's not what it is anymore. That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists, and they're making bank. Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion. It's mind-blowing to see the kind of infrastructure that's been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scam centers all around the world. These are very savvy business people. These are organized criminal rings. And so once we understand the magnitude of this problem,

we can protect people better. One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam victims sometimes feel too ashamed to discuss what happened to them. But Ian says one of our best defenses is simple. We need to talk to each other. We need to have those awkward conversations around what do you do if you have text messages you don't recognize? What do you do if you start getting asked to send information that's more sensitive? Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness, a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim. And we have these conversations all the time. So we are all at risk and we all

need to work together to protect each other. Learn more about how to protect yourself at vox.com slash Zelle. And when using digital payment platforms, remember to only send money to people you know and trust. on your mind. But if customers don't know about you, the rest of it doesn't really matter. Luckily, there's Constant Contact. Constant Contact's award-winning marketing platform can help your businesses stand out, stay top of mind, and see big results. Sell more, raise more, and build more genuine relationships with your audience through a suite of digital marketing tools made to fast track your growth. With Constant Contact, you can get email marketing that helps you create and send the perfect email to every customer and create, promote, and manage your events with ease,

all in one place. Get all the automation, integration, and reporting tools that get your marketing running seamlessly. All backed by Constant Contact's expert live customer support. Ready, set, grow. Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca Thank you. That was a lot.

That was a lot of stuff you're doing there. And in non-conflict times, it would be super impressive. And it's more impressive and also sad, all the things you have to use it for right now. But let's start with you started developing it before the war, but also before COVID. What did you learn using DIA during COVID that became useful once the conflict with Russia started? DIA was conceptualized in 2019, and we launched it in February of 2020. The most important part of the philosophy of this DIA is caring about the human being. So when COVID started, we began to look for an answer.

What is it that troubles our people? They need to know where they can come and get vaccinated. They need to sign up to be vaccinated. But it's important to note that a real technological revolution took place during COVID. The first day when a pandemic was announced, I gave a phone call to the prime minister and said, let's discuss the strategy. Let us stop making face-to-face meetings and doing them online. Until today, we hold many government meetings online, and we created another special app to allow people who stay home to continue working from home. There's no doubt that any critical situation is an incentive for development

of new technology. Okay. So, DIA now includes a chatbot for citizens to report on Russian troop movements. There's all kinds of things. How did you shift the application of it? Because that's a dramatic shift from vaccine information to here are the Russians in this part or here are the troops or things like that. It is the same philosophy. The invasion starts, and the main question is, what it is that the people need right now? Information in real time. So, oh, yeah, we launched this TV radio in Diyar. Quick payments of subsidies for evacuation.

So we launched that service. Once airstrikes began to happen and missiles were hitting people's homes, we launched the service to register the damages and so on. So we keep thinking about the Ukrainian person and their needs. We keep this in our minds. So when you're doing that, when, say, U.S. tech companies are thinking something, oh, they need a dating service, a laundry service, all this silliness most of the time, who sits around and goes, ah, we need, where's the bombs? Who thinks

of that within your group? Because that's a very, even though you're giving information, it's a very different thing than, you know, basic services most people use these apps for in other parts of the world. The main task of a government is to understand the needs of the people, to frame them, and to find ways to resolve them. We are not a creative team who invents some entertaining projects. We have a clear cycle of policymaking. We do an ongoing sociological survey. We collect data on our boards and we analyze those data. And it's very important

that the culture in our ministry is different from a typical government culture. We have people who came to serve this mission. So what is the most important of the things that you've added on? You know, you were painting a picture of normal times where you would use all these services and try to make government more efficient and less corrupt. But what is the most useful thing right now in the conflict of just one feature that you have that's been useful, most useful? That's a good question.

Because we have many very good, cool services. But I think the most useful is not really a service. It's the new culture in the government. Government officials are competing to get their product a priority in launching that new service. It's a change of thinking, change of mindset. They are now thinking of how to address and resolve people's needs as conveniently as possible. So, Administrator Power, cybersecurity has been a focus of USAID's work in Ukraine since 2020. Explain why that is.

Was it part of the development of DIA or a different project? It's got to be top of mind here, given Ukraine is ground zero for Russian disinformation. That's where they've tested out everything long ago and have continued to attack. Absolutely. Before I answer that, if I could just bring home why, how DIA matters and how sort of in a way removed we are here from the ground situation in Ukraine. As we were walking in earlier this morning, Deputy Prime Minister Fedorov was showing me photos of his neighborhood, which was bombed overnight, and showing photos of the damage to the roof. Well, first of all, that's harrowing and brutal,

and the Russians have to be held accountable for these crimes, one. Two, somebody will be going and snapping a picture of the damage to their roof, uploading it into the app, and at some point getting back an estimate of what the damage is. And at some point, actually, restitution for that damage will come via the government to the citizen. damage will come via the government to the citizen. It's just mind-blowing how in real time, how useful this is just to your exchange with him. In terms of cybersecurity, there's no way to imagine retaining the trust of the people if the system that every week offers more and more services to the people is vulnerable to Russian hacking. So as a design feature of DIA, very much following the lead of the Ukrainian officials who were designing it, they said to us, we have to do these two things in parallel. We have to think about citizen services. We have to think about this as an anti-corruption tool. But we can't have our cybersecurity protections for the government

living over here and DIA living as this sort of trusting being over here. And so we have been working with the Ukrainian government since 2014 on cyber protections more broadly, you know, to electricity infrastructure, to, you know, government bank accounts and the like. But once this became embedded into the Ukrainian government infrastructure, as it happens, digital infrastructure, and once it was clear that citizens' lives would all live in this single device, that became incredibly important. And these hackathons that they have, I mean, they have some of the, I mean, I know there are hackers everywhere, but they have some what appear to be extremely sophisticated hackers hacking themselves

day in, day out, looking for those vulnerabilities. And this is the dog that has not barked in this war, in this phase of the war. Given how much Russia is investing in bringing down Ukrainian systems, every day we should be hearing about that. Occasionally, there's a temporary outage, and then the systems are back up and running. And that's in part because not only with DIA, but with the rest of the functioning of the state, cybersecurity is not an afterthought. It's sort of like turning the lights on. You can't think about anything that the state does without thinking about the Russian Federation's attempt to destroy it.

Right, exactly. No, that's just Twitter on a daily basis. But anti-corruption efforts were important. I saw you laugh. Anti-corruption efforts are hard of developing, Dia, with the government. How does it fight corruption? Explain that.

You were talking about no more lines, et cetera, et cetera, which is appealing to anyone who uses government services. But corruption remains a problem in Ukraine. The chief of the Supreme Court was arrested on May, I think, the 18th, and a high-level corruption case expands. So talk a little bit about the corruption issues, because think, the 18th, and a high-level corruption case expands. So talk a little bit about the corruption issues, because that was the original thought of this, is to solve this problem that plagues many countries around the world.

First of all, we haven't really started working on the courts. Oh, no. Neither have we. Neither have we. But go ahead. But the sphere where we did apply our effort, construction, such cases you won't find. I really was always interested in how independent government institutions are built in the U.S. And we as a team studied your history. We understand that this is the path we are going to walk on for 100% sure.

The anti-corruption infrastructure is quite powerful now. So what we are focused on right now, our task is to remove the role of a human agency in those services where corruption risks are the highest. What we are trying to accomplish is that information that needs to be verified and checked in the registries is done automatically without human involvement. So when an individual wants to start a construction and they file an application for a permit registries automatically verify one registry talks to another registry to see if there are any restrictions imposed for certain construction so it's impossible that there'll be a subjective decision of an official saying,

I'm not going to allow this. The principle of our work is all services are launched automatically. So you can always arrange it in such a way that the human factor will be minimized. So no humans is the solution. All bots. Yes. He's like, yes, all bots. That's coming. Kara, can I add just one quick thing on this? Because it's such a good question. But like we say, more transparent, more visible.

But how practically does it work? One of the things that Congress has given USAID since this full scale invasion began is an unprecedented amount of money in direct budget support which sounds kind of obvious of course we would do that we want to stand with ukraine but it's totally unprecedented these this kind of scale of investment and we're talking in along the lines of about 15 billion dollars in in a sense cash to the ukrainian government which was famously corrupt you know in in past years and still has work, as you noted, to do on corruption today. I don't know if we could have gotten that money

out of Congress, if not for DIA, because what DIA allows us to do is that direct budget support goes, yes, to the Ukrainian government, but then it goes to pay teachers, to pay healthcare workers, to pay first responders. And there's a digital trail. It's not, you know, some official deciding this or that. It actually is going directly into the bank accounts in a manner that just, it would have been untraceable in a prior regime. So what kind of aid is USAID concentrating upon Ukraine right now? I think 43 million is here, which is in this effort. Is that correct? If you're talking about the Ministry of Digital Transformation and DIA,

yes, that is the investment. That's fairly modest. That's what Jeff Bezos has in his pocket, but go ahead. It's not a lot in tech. It's not, but it's, I mean, Deputy Prime Minister can speak to it better than I have because he's lived this flurry of advance over these last four years. But, you know, on their accounts, it's 80% between us and the United Kingdom's support. It's 80% of what they needed to launch this. It didn't take much because they had some of the necessary infrastructure before. much because they had some of the necessary infrastructure before. And I think one of the biggest achievements that we haven't really talked about as we Americans envy this is the coverage. You need a critical mass for this to really become what it has become. And they have crossed

that tipping point. They have around half of eligible adults, but they have an older population. So now the target in this next phase, which is very difficult to reach in wartime, is an elderly population that may not have smartphones or may not be online. But that's a manageable challenge. You know, it's a challenging challenge, don't get me wrong. You know, it's a challenging challenge, don't get me wrong, but imagine an entire country, again, able, when President Zelensky comes forward and says, we'd like to introduce this piece of legislation, being able to go thumbs up, thumbs down, you know, with a click. Imagine them being able to crowdsource new services and new ideas in the post-war reconstruction phase. And this point that Mr. Federoff made about construction, imagine in a reconstruction phase not having the ability

to take your smartphone, go up to a construction site, look at the QR code, take a photo with the QR code, see who the contract went to, see who the subcontractor is, the sub to the sub. That's rife for corruption. And if there's corruption, you're not going to see international investment at the scale that they need. So getting that money, even though it works for them, it's a small amount of money, do you perceive any pushback to that? Because there has been growing pushback. In the United States? Yeah. On this specifically, no. As you say, it's very small compared to the direct budget support number I just gave you of more than $15 billion. I mean, USAID is working in the agricultural sector, helping farmers store their grains while Putin

tries to slow roll getting the grains out. We work with independent media, giving journalists flak jackets and making sure that public television can broadcast. We work with NGOs fighting misinformation. So we do a lot in a lot of different sectors. I think you're right that questions have been raised on Capitol Hill about the sustainability of these investments. But, you know, you also may have heard most recently Speaker McCarthy talking about how much he recognizes that Ukraine has to win this war. And I think what's so important about this conversation is that most of the media interest in U.S. support has been in weapon systems. But this is its own weapon. I mean,

not only because citizens are using it to report on Russian troop movements, that's true. But imagine, again, if the democracy were either to just stay in place, just be at a standstill, or if the lights were to go out. And that's why I mentioned the link between DIA and being able to continue to vouch for the assistance going where it is intended. We need that in order to be able to go up and defend investments that are just as critical to Ukraine winning this war as the latest weapon systems. We'll be back in a minute. Support for the show comes from Indeed. If you need to hire, you may need Indeed. Indeed is a matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors, according to Indeed data.

And a matching engine that helps you find quality candidates fast. Listeners of this show can get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to indeed.com slash podcast right now and say you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Your business is ready for launch. But what's the most important thing to do before those doors open? Is it getting more social media followers? Or is it actually legitimizing and protecting the business you've been busy building? Make it official with LegalZoom. LegalZoom has everything you need to launch, run, and protect your business all in one place. Setting up your

business properly and remaining compliant are the things you want to get right from the get-go. And LegalZoom saves you from wasting hours making sense of the legal stuff. And if you need some hands-on help, their network of experienced attorneys from around the country has your back. Launch, run, and protect your business to make it official today at LegalZoom.com and use promo code VoxBiz to get 10% off any LegalZoom business formation product, excluding subscriptions and renewals. Expires December 31st, 2024. Get everything you need from setup to success at LegalZoom.com and use promo code VoxBiz. LegalZoom.com and use promo code VoxBiz.

LegalZoom provides access to independent attorneys and self-service tools. LegalZoom is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice, except we're authorized through its subsidiary law firm, LZ Legal Services, LLC. So talk then about the, Minister, about the idea of surveillance, because I think that's a big worry in this country. The idea of a single app here, I don't see ever happening in the United States, even though a lot of people have talked about it. There's deep worries about government surveillance, privacy, hacking, everything else. We don't have a national privacy bill in the United States still, 20 years in.

It's not just hacking, but the idea of having, when it said unified system, I have to say, I was like, no, no, no, no. Like even, and even I am, I'm very digital and digital forward-leaning. It feels like there's a vulnerability part that could come into play, especially if the Russians gained control of it, for example, or any authoritarian state did? We were starting to create DIA in 2019. At that time, Ukraine already had a war, an ongoing war. So we understood our challenges. So from the very beginning, our architecture was focused on maximum security. DIA does not store personal information, for example. The information is stored in registries outside your DIA, and DIA is just a platform that communicates with them,

communicates and facilitates changes. We are now opening the code of DIA. To other countries, right. We're going to make it open code so anybody could see the architecture of DIA. We are going to make it open code so anybody could see the architecture of DIA. We are going to put in a tool where, like, when you come to visit a doctor, DIA will inform you that now the doctor is opening your medical file. So we want an individual to be protected not just from Russian hackers like them,

but also from abuse by officials. We've done that now with credit history checks. You can see people seeing you or looking for you. That's right. One can see and get notified that somebody is checking your credit history in the registry. And that's why people trust DIA. It's technologically safe. One cannot get served by the system without your facial signature. So if you lose your phone, someone else cannot use it instead of you. And these new notifications will be another addition to trust.

Notifications. In an article for the Atlantic Council, Minister Fedorov wrote, since the invasion began, Ukraine has demonstrated a readiness to innovate that more conservative Russian military simply cannot match, sort of fighting a 20th century war. But is tech enough? You mentioned that through tech this will work. I've heard that a lot, the idea that tech can solve a war, help a war along. How important is stressing tech in this situation compared to weaponry or other things. Yeah, no, I don't think I, at least I didn't intend to overstate and say, you know, when cruise missiles are raining down on your head, your smartphone is the answer.

I mean, this is a multifaceted response. What I'm saying is that the idea that you can win on one battlefront and not continue to strengthen the rule of law, fight corruption, strengthen democracy, keep citizens feeling like their government is delivering for them, because it would be very easy for citizens to sour, you know, on lots right now, given the human toll of this conflict on them, and that, you know, it's not every day that you're taking town after town back. You know, they need to be sustained in other ways. Moreover, just the sheer hardship of losing temporarily a large chunk of your country,

the number of people who are displaced and who have no place to go. So I don't think anybody is suggesting that tech is the answer. It is a comparative advantage. There's nothing comparable happening on the other side of the front lines, just as the Ukrainian will to fight. And the fact that they're defending their homes rather than invading somebody else's country is a comparative advantage. And it's that set of comparative advantages that have them defying the odds in having won the Battle of Kiev, advantages that have them defying the odds in having won the Battle of Kyiv, won the battle for winter. Putin tried to weaponize winter, you know, turn the cold against the Ukrainian people. Their ingenuity, not through tech, but through rebuilding, you know, pipes. Well, broadly speaking, innovation.

Innovation, but also determination. That combination and USAID, $400 million of USAID support for boilers, generators, again, replacement pipes and the like. So it takes, at the core, it's the Ukrainians who have turned the tide on Russian aggression. But, you know, it's the rallying of democracies behind them in service of these other features of defense. So one of the things that you've talked about, you've written a lot about, Minister, is talking about not just air defense missiles and long-range drones, but weapons are kind of obvious. You've done two things that you call the IT army.

You said, I think the future is with tech, and this is why we will win. Governments must move towards becoming more and more like tech companies rather than being rigid like a tank, like a war machine. And then you noted, after all, success in modern warfare depends primarily on data and technology, not the numbers of 1960s tanks. You can deploy at your willingness to use infantry as cannon fodder. Ukraine has used everything from drones and satellite imagery to artificial intelligence and situational awareness tools in order to inflict maximum damage on Russian forces while preserving the lives of Ukrainian service personnel. Talk about this idea of military tech, how important it is, because it's not just this app, it's other ways, especially through drones. This is a separate project we're working on. We are running this project called the Army of Drones in Ukraine. And we already increased manufacture of drones in Ukraine dozens of times.

To that end, we changed the government policies that regulate drone manufacturing. So these new start-up centers, that's where innovations come up. We have seen this market emerge in front of our eyes and grow. In the beginning, there were only seven companies that could be government contractors in this field. Now there are hundreds, more than a hundred. So we started the project named brave one and that's a military cluster of uh projects products uh and innovation is is is developing there this is a new a big sphere and uh in in months or maybe a year there'll be a big revolution here coming up as well so what my last few questions are around what comes next, because here

you're applying all this technology to a wartime situation, and you're trying to innovate in the middle of a war, using whether it's drone technology, whether it's situational awareness, all kinds of things. It's also a testing ground for what's to come, not just in more tech, but in the future of Ukraine. Now, Ukraine had been quite technological, along with Estonia, Latvia, and Russia itself. How important is tech going to be for the future of Ukraine in terms of coming back? Obviously, agriculture is a huge market. I'd love you both to think about what that means afterwards, because you said reconstruction, very hopefully. Many people feel it's going to drag on for a while.

But what does first you reconstruction mean and what technology will be part of that? And then how do you look at that after this? I guess you could go add a dating app later, but not today because you've got other concerns. But talk about what it means. Yeah. And again, we just know reconstruction is going to happen at some point. None of us can predict when that starts in terms of full-scale reconstruction, but reconstruction is happening now. To your question about tech more broadly, one of the industries that USAID has invested in since really 2014 is the tech industry. And there are major issues, of course, attracting private investment to Ukraine, facilitating trade from

Ukraine in a live war zone. But last year, the tech sector saw its most substantial increase in the export of services ever. And actually, tech as an industry, along with grain, again, for which Ukraine is famous, and this burgeoning crop of young IT professionals, this is one of the largest growing sources of revenue for a Ukrainian government that has to continue to take in revenue from its citizens, from its private sector, from its economy, in order to be able to fuel the war and ultimately be able to fuel the peace. So if you hear nothing else, I think, today, it's just that Ukraine is not standing still. Last thing I'll say, just because you asked about the future, and it's probably my last word, is we are really excited about this as a model for many of the other developing countries that we're working in.

And what's great about the way the Ukrainians are engaging other countries is they're saying it's a menu. You know, we right now are doing assessments of what the digital infrastructure looks like, what their capacities are. But citizens and countries are the ones to decide which of these features are going to run afoul of our privacy concerns, which of these features are premature because we don't have the cybersecurity infrastructure that Ukraine has. And so, you know, this is now something that other countries can look to, which is, you know, at a time when Putin is trying to win an information war in the Global South, for Ukraine to be also highlighting this aspect of what Ukraine is and does, namely a democratic aspect, a crowdsourced aspect, an aspect focused on anti-corruption, that's also a very important message as well as a very important tool in the Global South.

I think the most important tool in the global south? I think the most important thing about the post-war reconstruction that it's going to be not so much reconstruction as rather transformation. The key transformation I anticipate is that out of a country that was selling some resources or developing something, again, for export. This will be a country that will be making products for others. DIA is a product. And now that we have dozens and hundreds of companies that will be making those advanced drones,

that the whole world is going to be buying. So I think our task right now, as we are receiving all this aid is to build our own institutions so in the future they will be able to work effectively and deliver. We want our partners to understand that we also want to create value, add value, and work effectively. And this will be a win-win situation. And my very last question, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask what you need from U.S. tech companies. and work effectively. And this will be a win-win situation. And my very last question,

I'd be remiss if I didn't ask what you need from U.S. tech companies. Obviously, at the beginning of the war, you pressed them to take down Russian propaganda. You asked them for all kinds of help. I'd love to do a quick, very quick last thing, lightning round of what you need from some of these companies. I asked them to not stop.

We have excellent relationships with them. We continuously think how we can be useful for them. And we now have built a very good, normal partnership relations. It may sound strange, but I do not have any requests right now for Really? Yeah. Okay. Let's just go on. Okay. Thank you so much.

Thank you. He wants nothing, no favors from the tech sector. That's a far cry from his letters early on in the war. Yeah, I think they've been cooperative with him, though. I think for the most part, all the companies have been relatively cooperative and on the side of Ukraine here. You know, they're trying to work with everyone because they need as much help as they can get. You had an interesting back and forth there when Power brought up the 43 million in money that went into making this app. You kind of joked that this was the money in Bezos' back

pocket. And it is kind of enlightening how much can be done with so little comparably, given all the wealth we have here in this country. Yeah, well, there's more things. They're aiming for the future, like what's going to happen after this, whether it's agriculture and helping with agriculture is obviously Ukraine's biggest export and the most important thing there. But eventually, they'll have to have other industries. Tech would be one of them. And so it is important for this amount of money to go there for that and redevelopment. I mean, it was well spent in Germany. It's been well spent in Japan, that kind of money. And one hopes that this will be the case. And tech will definitely lead the way.

One of the crispest lines in here was when Power talked about taking the photo, knowing what's happening to the home, the roof, and then restitution that would be made via that photo. restitution that would be made via that photo. This kind of crowdsourced reality and data procurement that, you know, whether it's months from now, years from now, you know, decade from now when this war is over, can help make that restitution, help make that reality. That long view is very interesting. That's what I kind of took away from it. Yeah, there's going to be an end to this, as she noted, and you have to plan for that. The war's not just going to stop, and you have to figure out where to put people, where they're going to work, how they're going to rebuild. It's going to be a huge rebuilding. I mean, you just saw the Bahamut pictures. It was devastating. It's just, it's flattened by this Wagner group, so. And if you think corruption is bad during war,

just wait till corruption during reconstruction, seeing that. That's the way we are as humans, I guess. Well, you know, our equivalent of like this crowdsourced, you know, government support app is actually kind of, it's terrible as the citizen app, I think. I guess. It's not very big. It's not very big. We rely on private companies here versus the government. And that's the way it is here.

That's the way it's grown. Every country has a different technology profile. Ours is private companies run the show. Yeah. Although I really appreciated his approach of government having a different, more private sector approach to delivery. The UK did this with the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit. Singapore has done this, just having a more private sector orientation, which also means, in the case of Singapore, you pay people differently in government as well, which gets you better people. Indeed.

Anyways, the DIA app, let's see where it goes and where this war goes. Cara, do you mind to read us out? Yeah, hopefully it ends sooner than later. Today's show was produced by Naeem Arraza, Blake Neshek, Kristen Castro-Rossell, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher and Stephen Ames. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by Trackademics.

If you're already following the show, you get your own Starlink. If not, you get geofenced. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

We'll be back on Thursday with more. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees, and it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze.

So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Food insecurity still affects millions of individuals around the globe. And Nestle, a global leader in nutrition, health, and wellness, understands the importance of working together to create lasting change. Nestle's partnerships extend beyond just financial support. From building urban hoop houses to producing custom seasoning for food banks, Nestle and their partners actively engage

with local communities, listening to their needs and working together to find innovative solutions. Nestle is committed to helping support thriving, resilient communities today and for generations to come. Together, we can help to build stronger, healthier communities. Learn more at nestle.com.