Rounding a corner in Kyiv on 24 Feb 2022, Oleksandr Bornyakov remembers driving into a gun battle.
It was day one of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Russian saboteurs were fighting with Ukrainian security forces in the centre of the Ukrainian capital.
“There is shooting, cars are burning, armoured vehicles are burning… when we eventually passed… there were a lot of bodies.”
As a government minister he had been ordered to drive hundreds of kilometres west and continue his work in a safer location.
Beginning in 2019, Bornykov, Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation, had been managing the shift of Ukraine’s government services to a new app called Diia (the Ukrainian word for action).
