Behind the app saving lives in Kyiv

As Russian forces descended on Ukraine and troops marched towards the capital Kyiv, employees at Kyiv Digital congregated at its data centre. The team of 20 resided there for two weeks.

For Kyiv City Council’s deputy CIO Victoria Itskovych, making sure the cities digital services stayed online during the attempted invasion was imperative.

“At that time, our data centre was the core of all our services,” she told The Next Web conference in Amsterdam as part of a keynote speech.

The Kyiv Digital app already played a vital role in the city. It had started as a digital service app offering smart parking and transportation services across the Ukrainian capital. It had expanded to allow users to pay utility bills and share information about transit closures, but during the Covid-19 pandemic, it became an even more important hub for residents to share vital information.

The app had already been downloaded by more than a million users, but as it began implementing new, life-saving services, downloads rocketed to over 2.3 million – just shy of the city’s peacetime population of around 2.8 million.

It leverages IoT sensors and cameras scattered throughout the city to help support Ukrainians.

“When the war came, the city needed notifications for air raids, so the digital app became a notification service,” Itskovych told the conference crowd.

As the people of Ukraine morphed from everyday citizens into wartime combatants and survivors, the app also transformed from a parking to protection as a wartime survival tool, reporting and notifying users of air raid alerts. It also maps out the nearest bomb shelters, pharmacies, grocery stores and other public services.

“The digital app became a life-saving service.”

“It was probably the second or third month [into the war], where it was obvious that this would be our new reality,” said Itskovych. “Before, we had a three-year plan, five-year plan, or ten-year plan to allow ourselves to start building something as a network. Now, we can’t do that, and we have to plan for right now, and plan short.”

As it stands, the app also allows citizens of Ukraine to report and upload written, photographic, or video evidence of missile destruction to support lawsuits in international councils. It has also created, and invested a lot, into e-democracy to allow to “ensure that people still have a voice and the ability to make their choice,” said Itskovych.

“All the petitioning and polling that is going on goes through the application,” she explains. So, users can view, support and monitor the progress of petitions they have signed, and participate in local polls, too.

Right now, Kyiv Digital is working on building radio connectivity to allow emergency services contact after a missile attack: “Every missile attack in the city is an emergency for all the services, so this is one of our priorities.”

Making a plan for disaster

At the beginning, Kyiv Digital’s initial steps were to disconnect the majority of not-so-necessary services so that the only services needed were left for speed. It then used international cloud and security partners such as Cloudfare and Cisco who help with the data protection.

“Of course, when the war started not all digital services were needed as transportation became absolutely free in the first few months, but, for example, video surveillance systems needed to stay and we had a lot of infrastructural damage inside Kyiv caused by some enemy groups, so we had a lot to repair,” explained Itskovych.

“When you’re in the field of IT infrastructure, usually you have all these disaster recovery plans. When they teach you how to create risk management, usually you take the risk and measure its probability.”

Things like a ransomware attack or a cyber threat were well within Kyiv Digital’s forward planning, but the deputy director admits the organisation had never planned for a full-scale war.

“If some risk is big, but probability is super low, usually you don’t make a plan for it,” admitted the CIO. “We never had a plan for a missile attack, or even a plan for if the people who are managing your infrastructure are dying.”

While Itskovych speaks on Kyiv’s internal horrors, she makes a point of how apps like these could also be necessary for other disasters in other countries in other disastrously unexpected incidents.

“It can be needed for any city during a natural disaster or incident such as a flooding or forest fires,” she points out.

If those working on the app could go back in time, Itskovych admits that they would take the most unrealistic scenario, and make a plan for it.

“I mean look at what has happened, no one believed in a pandemic covering the world, and then war as well, so what is the next thing?”