Diia is not just a convenience layer; it is a national digital architecture that brings government documents and services into one user-facing system.
According to Ukraine’s official Digital State platform, Diia now serves more than 22 million users, offers 30 digital documents, supports 5.8 million portal users, and provides 150+ online services.
The same official source says Ukraine was the first country where digital passports became full legal counterparts of paper documents, and that business registration online can take minutes rather than days.
Its importance becomes clearer when viewed through global digital-government frameworks. The World Bank’s GovTech Maturity Index measures countries across four dimensions: core government systems, online service delivery, citizen engagement, and GovTech enablers, and it covers 198 economies.
In its 2025 update, Ukraine was placed in Group A, the “GovTech Leaders” group.
That matters because it suggests that Ukraine is not merely digitizing isolated services; it is building a coherent digital state with interoperable systems and citizen-facing tools that meet a global benchmark for maturity.
The UN’s E-Government Survey 2024 points in the same direction, noting steady global progress in digital government while also emphasizing persistent inequality and the need for resilient, inclusive systems. Taken together, these frameworks help explain why Diia is being discussed internationally not as a national experiment, but as a reference model.
What makes Ukraine’s case especially significant is that it advanced this model under conditions of war, displacement, and physical destruction.
Through Diia, Ukrainians can support the Armed Forces of Ukraine, buy war bonds, report damaged property, apply for housing repair compensation through eVidnovlennia, request residence and criminal-record certificates, replace a driver’s license, get married, and register or close a sole proprietorship. In other words, the digital state did not become less relevant in wartime; it became one of the main ways the state remained present.
That is an unusual political achievement. Many governments digitize for efficiency; Ukraine has also used digitization for continuity, emergency response, and social resilience.
Ukraine’s model is often compared to Estonia, and the comparison is useful because Estonia remains one of the clearest examples of long-term digital-state building.
Estonia’s official e-Residency program says it launched in 2014, provides secure digital access to Estonian e-services, and now supports over 110,000 people and their businesses operating location-independently.
Estonia also states that over the last 30 years it has made essentially all government services available online through secure digital identity. But Ukraine’s contribution is different: it demonstrates that a digital state is not only a product of prosperity and administrative patience.
It can also be built, scaled, and normalized under direct military attack. That is what makes Diia a global benchmark rather than merely a regional success story. It shows that digital public infrastructure can function as an instrument of survival, not just modernization.
That broader significance fits the emerging global language of digital public infrastructure. The World Bank defines DPI as foundational digital building blocks designed for public benefit, reusable across sectors, built around identity, payments, and data-sharing, and governed by principles such as openness, modularity, privacy-by-design, and strong governance.
UNDP likewise describes DPI as the backbone of modern societies, enabling secure interactions between people, businesses, and governments.
Diia fits this logic closely: it is not just a service portal, but a reusable state platform that connects identity, documents, payments, compensation, participation, and administrative action.
The lesson for international audiences is that the future of the state is increasingly infrastructural. A state is not only its ministries and borders; it is also the digital rails through which rights are recognized, services are delivered, and trust is maintained.
There is also a democratic dimension that should not be overlooked. Digital government can easily become exclusionary if it is not designed for access, and Ukraine’s recent work on Diia shows that the benchmark is not static.
UNDP reported in December 2025 that Ukraine completed accessibility improvements to the Diia portal so that blind users and other people with disabilities could access government services more easily and the portal would align with digital accessibility standards.
That matters because a “state in a smartphone” is only worthy of the name if it is not a state for the digitally privileged alone. Ukraine’s challenge, like that of any digital democracy, is to make convenience compatible with inclusion, speed with accountability, and innovation with rights.
The point is not that Ukraine has solved every problem; it is that it has made unusually serious progress on the hard problem of building a state that remains functional, visible, and usable under extreme pressure. So, as a global benchmark, Diia matters for a reason larger than national branding. It shows that digital government can be legally and administratively fast.
That is why the “state in a smartphone” is not just a slogan. Ukraine has made it real.
