Six Weeks Under Siege: Kyiv’s CIO on Keeping the City Running

I started the European leg of this journey in Ukraine—a war zone, which is kind of a mad thing to do. I went to Ukraine because I think they are the most interesting case of government transformation in the world right now. Case in point, my first conversation. Victoria Iskovich, CIO and Director of IT for the City of Kyiv, takes us inside the first six weeks of Russia’s invasion. She shares how her team lived and worked from the city’s data centre, moved critical infrastructure in the middle of the night to protect it from being bombed, and repurposed technology they had already built to support the war effort. The story reads like an action film. The reality, of course, is far more brutal. This is a short conversation about crisis, courage, technology—and the people behind the scenes keeping a city running when almost everything around them is falling apart. What can public servants everywhere learn from the way Victoria and her team responded? Leg 2 has been sponsored by The Kindred Agency. A people-centred Canadian company focusing on building ethical agentic AI for good.