For thousands of Ukrainians, Mark Hamill is the voice of air raids. The first notice of an imminent attack is a clap of thunder oops-oops coming out of the cell phone speakers, followed by the voice of the Star Wars actor in full tones of Jedi Knight. “Air raid alert. Go to the nearest shelter,” he said. “Don’t be careless. Your overconfidence is your weakness. In mid-May, after a few months of calm in the skies over kyiv, Russia resumed its almost nightly bombardments with cruise missiles and kamikaze drones. After a week of alerts, the novelty of “May the Force be with you” blaring asynchronously from a dozen phones in the bomb shelter wore off, and it was hard not to start blaming Hamill personally for the attacks.
The air warning application was developed by a homeland security company, Ajax Systems, on the second day of the war, in a process that embodies the speed, flexibility and creativity that enabled the Ukraine, at times, is conducting its war effort like a startup, under the leadership of its 32-year-old deputy prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov.
On February 25, 2022, as fighter jets clashed low above kyiv, Ajax marketing director Valentine Hrytsenko headed west out of the capital, helping to oversee the evacuating the company’s manufacturing facilities, when his phone rang. He was the CEO of an IT outsourcing company who wanted to know if Ajax had any experience with Apple’s Critical Alert feature, which allows governments or emergency services to send alerts to users. Municipal air raid sirens were, in Hrytsenko’s words, “old-fashioned bullshit,” built during the Soviet era, and often inaudible. People were already tinkering with their own mutual alert systems using Telegram, but these depended on volunteers finding out when raids were coming and posting them on public groups, making them unreliable and insecure.
From his car, Hrytsenko called Valeriya Ionan, the Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation, whom he had known for years in the ministry on projects in the technology sector. In turn, she connected him with several local “digital transformation agents,” government officials installed by Fedorov’s ministry in each region of Ukraine, tasked with finding technological solutions to bureaucratic problems. Together, they figured out how the air raid system actually worked: An official in a bunker would receive a call from the military and he would press a button to trigger the sirens. Ajax engineers built another button and app for them. Within a week, the beta version was available. In March, the whole country was covered. “I think this would be impossible in other countries,” Hrytsenko says. “Imagine, on the second day of the war, I send a message to the deputy minister. We talk for five minutes and they give us the green light.
When he came to government five years ago, Fedorov promised that his new Ministry of Digital Transformation would create “tangible products that change people’s lives,” making government entrepreneurial and responsive to people’s needs. The process works exactly as Fedorov envisioned. The products aren’t quite what he had in mind.
Fedorov is tall and broad, with broad schoolboy features and short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. Almost always seen dressed in a hoodie and jeans, he looks like a movie star unsuccessfully preparing for a role. When we meet, he has just come off stage after holding a press conference to launch a new digital education initiative. In keeping with the government’s carefully curated image, it’s a slick affair, with light strips and high-definition screens, celebrity cameos and a Google executive giving a speech via video call. It takes place in a five-star hotel near the banks of the Dnipro but, as a concession to the ever-present threat of airstrikes, it takes place in the underground car park. The darkness, the neon lights and the young crowd in sneakers and designer sportswear give the whole thing a kind of subversive glamour.
