“In 2025, the WINWIN AI Center of Excellence under the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine together with the national operator of electronic communications Kyivstar defined a strategic goal – to develop a national…”, — write: www.unian.ua
In 2025, the WINWIN AI Center of Excellence under the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, together with the national electronic communications operator Kyivstar, set a strategic goal – to develop a national Ukrainian LLM. Kyivstar acted as a strategic partner of the state and operational executor of the development. During this time, the project went from the concept to the implementation of specific technical solutions. Now the teams are moving to the key stage – large-scale data preparation and formation of quality standards for the future model.
The Gemma family of models from Google was chosen as the basic technological basis for the Ukrainian LLM – a modern open AI model of the new generation, which has already proven its effectiveness in international and local projects. It is adapted to the Ukrainian language, context and cultural and historical features.
An important part of the project is currently underway – preparation and verification of data for model training. A high-quality Ukrainian LLM requires not only open Internet sources, but also the processing of historical archives, documentary materials, etc. The model will be trained on specially selected, depersonalized corpus of texts. Data for training is collected in cooperation with government agencies, media, universities and scientific institutions. At the same time, a significant part of important materials is still preserved exclusively in paper form, which emphasizes the relevance of further digitization of the cultural and scientific heritage of Ukraine.
An expert committee was created to independently control the quality of the development, which works in four areas: scientific and technical, legal, cultural-historical and linguistic. One of the key tasks of the committee is the development of professional benchmarks that will allow to objectively evaluate the quality, correctness and safety of the model.
In January 2026, the team plans to receive:
- the first verified database of text data for Ukrainian LLM training;
- an improved tokenizer adapted to the peculiarities of the Ukrainian language, which will increase the speed and productivity of text processing;
- own system of benchmarks for evaluating the quality, efficiency and security of the language model.
In parallel, a legal framework is being formed that will ensure transparent and safe work with data, as well as compliance with the requirements of legislation in the field of intellectual property.
The launch of the first version of the Ukrainian LLM in the beta testing format is planned for the spring of 2026. Separately, in January 2026, a public vote for the name of the Ukrainian LLM will start in the Diya application.
Help about KyivstarPJSC “Kyivstar” is the leading operator of electronic communications in Ukraine, which as of September 30, 2025 served about 22.5 million mobile subscribers and more than 1.2 million fixed line subscribers. The company provides services using a wide range of mobile and fixed technologies, including 4G, BigData, cloud solutions, services for cyber protection, digital television, etc. PJSC “Kyivstar” is developing new telecommunications technologies in Ukraine and, together with VEON, plans to invest $1 billion in this direction. USA in 2023-2027.
Kyivstar PJSC is a subsidiary of Kyivstar Group Ltd (Nasdaq: KYIV; KYIVW), the first Ukrainian company whose shares are traded on the American Nasdaq stock exchange.
The company is helping Ukraine overcome the challenges of wartime and over the past three years has directed more than UAH 3.4 billion to support the Defense Forces, subscribers and the implementation of social projects. PJSC “Kyivstar” has been operating in Ukraine for 27 years and is recognized as the largest taxpayer in the electronic communications market, the best employer and a socially responsible company.