Ukraine’s state app Diia has saved citizens and the government roughly 184 billion hryvnia (around 3.6 billion euros) since 2020, according to a study published March 19 by Kyrylo Kryvolap and his colleagues at the consultancy Civitta.
Commissioned by Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, the year-long analysis put the figure at about one hundred times the cost of building the app. The savings come from removing opportunities for bribe-taking during routine transactions.
Registering a car online fell from 5,398 hryvnia to 1,369 hryvnia.
Filing an annual tax declaration dropped from 467 hryvnia to 182.
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Those numbers, the study argues, represent money that no longer flows to corrupt officials.
Mykhailo Fedorov, who ran the digital ministry for six years, made that kind of saving his mission. In 2021 he told Ukraine’s construction lobby that digitising building permits had already produced 1.5 billion hryvnia in anti-corruption effect that year alone. “This is money that people did not bring to corrupt offices,” he said. In January President Volodymyr Zelensky put Fedorov in charge of the defence ministry, then struggling with desertion and stalled drone output. Oleksandr Borniakov, his deputy and the architect of the Diia.City tax regime, now runs digital transformation.
Regional scores tell a different story
Ukraine’s progress sits inside a bleaker regional picture. On February 10, the day Transparency International published its Corruption Perceptions Index, Lidija Prokic, a regional adviser at the organisation, released her assessment. Eastern Europe and Central Asia scored an average of 34 out of 100, among the worst showings in years. Six of nineteen countries slid backward. Kazakhstan and Armenia moved the other way, gaining ten and eleven points respectively, to 38 and 46 — the sharpest improvements anywhere in the bloc.
Kassym-Jomart Tokayev gave 2026 its own name, declaring it Kazakhstan’s Year of Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence. His prime minister, Olzhas Bektenov, told a cabinet meeting in January that “every citizen must feel the practical effect of this work.” Days earlier Zhaslan Madiyev, the deputy prime minister running the brief, ordered every ministry onto a single platform called QazTech, banning new information systems built outside it. eGov Mobile handled 54 million transactions in 2025.
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Yet on June 30 a presidential decree abolished Kazakhstan’s Anti-Corruption Agency as an independent institution, folding its functions into the National Security Committee. The committee’s ordinary remit covers counter-intelligence and border security. It reported recovering 16.1 billion tenge (around 29.7 million euros) in corruption cases last year. The agency that used to do this work answered to its own charter. The committee that replaced it answers to the president.
The pattern repeats elsewhere. Shalva Papuashvili, the speaker of Georgia’s parliament, signed what he called the “law on transparency of foreign influence” in June 2024, requiring any NGO or media outlet receiving a fifth of its funding from abroad to register as an agent of foreign influence or face fines. Delia Ferreira Rubio, the chair of Transparency International, warned the bill would “derail future progress … including anti-corruption.” Parliament passed it anyway. Among the organisations now required to register is Transparency International’s own Georgian chapter — the body that supplies the corruption data used to judge the government. Georgia’s score held at 50 regardless; citizens can still renew a passport or register a business online without trouble.
It is plausible that digital services and anti-corruption enforcement can proceed on separate tracks, each stable enough in its own lane. A government can run flawless car registrations while a completely separate, political fight goes on over who gets to investigate a minister. The Diia app never touches that fight — which may be exactly why it keeps working.
Ukraine’s own test of independence
Volodymyr Zelensky signed a law in July 2025 stripping NABU and SAPO, Ukraine’s anti-corruption bureau and prosecutor’s office, of their independence. The law handed the prosecutor-general power to reassign or close their cases. Protesters filled the streets of Kyiv, Lviv and Dnipro — the first demonstrations against the government since the war began. Nine days later he signed a second law reversing the first. Diia kept issuing car registrations and tax declarations the entire time.