CASE STUDY
Together, Kyivstar, the Ministry of Digital Transformation, VEON and Google are laying the foundation for a new chapter in Ukraine’ s AI journey.
Ethical, linguistic and security considerations
For the Ministry of Digital Transformation and the WINWIN AI Center of Excellence, controllability and ethical alignment were core considerations in choosing the base model.
" We are building the Ukrainian LLM on a readymade open-source model. The main task in development is to train it on our unique data further," said Danylo Tsvok, Chief AI Officer at the Ministry of Digital Transformation and CEO of the WINWIN AI Center of Excellence.
" When choosing a model, we focused on how well it already handles Ukrainian-language texts and how controllable it is during additional training. This will help minimise linguistic and ethical risks in our LLM."
By starting with a model that already demonstrates strong multilingual performance, the development team can focus on refining Ukrainian-specific capabilities such as grammar, idioms, legal terminology and historical references.
VEON’ s vision for localised AI
For VEON Group, the Ukrainian LLM represents a continuation of its broader strategy to close the AI language gap across its markets.
" Kyivstar and the Ukrainian Digital Ministry have taken a major step forward today," said Kaan Terzioglu, CEO, VEON Group.
" With a sovereign Ukrainian LLM, Ukrainian consumers, businesses and government institutions will be empowered to integrate cutting-edge technologies using augmented intelligence that truly speaks Ukrainian and understands Ukraine."
The Ukrainian initiative follows earlier VEONsupported projects including KazLLM in Kazakhstan and an Urdu-language LLM initiative in Pakistan.
Google Cloud’ s role
From Google’ s perspective, the project highlights Gemma’ s growing role as a foundation for national and domain-specific language models.
Krzysztof Kaziów, Director of Customer Engineering for Central and Eastern Europe at Google Cloud, said: " We are honoured that the Ministry of Digital Transformation and Kyivstar have selected Gemma as the foundation for the Ukrainian national LLM. This choice underscores Gemma’ s strategic value, offering an optimal balance between performance and resources alongside its strong multilingual support."
By deploying the model on Vertex AI, the project benefits from scalable infrastructure, advanced tooling for training and evaluation and enterprise-grade security features.
From foundation to applications
The development roadmap for the Ukrainian LLM begins with optimisation. Kyivstar will first refine Gemma specifically for Ukrainian language use, including improvements to the tokenizer and training on carefully curated Ukrainian datasets.
Once completed, the Ukrainian LLM is expected to serve as a foundational layer for a wide range of AI-powered services across both the public and private sectors.
By training the model on Ukrainian data and embedding local context from the outset, Kyivstar aims to deliver outputs that are more accurate, relevant and actionable than those produced by general-purpose global models.
Together, Kyivstar, the Ministry of Digital Transformation, VEON and Google are laying the foundation for a new chapter in Ukraine’ s AI journey, one where advanced technology is deeply aligned with national identity, security and long-term digital resilience. This initiative signals long-term commitment to responsible innovation, economic resilience, digital sovereignty and trusted artificial intelligence adoption nationwide. •
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