Comment: From dispersed potential to a digital space for Ukrainian renewal

LVIV -- The war has dispersed millions of Ukrainians across Europe and beyond. For many, this was not emigration in the classical sense, not a carefully planned life choice, but forced migration caused by danger, destroyed homes, disrupted work, and the loss of a familiar environment. Yet these people have not ceased to be part of Ukraine.
They remain connected to the country through family, language, culture, professional identity, civic responsibility, business ties, and the hope of return - whether physical, economic, intellectual, or symbolic. Many of them are now living inside European societies, learning new standards, entering new professional networks, creating businesses, educating children, and gaining experience that may become critically important for Ukraine’s future.
This means that Ukraine must learn to see its dispersed citizens not only as a vulnerable group in need of support, but also as a powerful national resource.
Among Ukrainians abroad are entrepreneurs, engineers, doctors, teachers, scientists, students, IT specialists, managers, volunteers, investors, cultural leaders, and local community organisers. They carry knowledge, contacts, professional skills, and trust networks that could contribute to Ukraine’s recovery and long-term transformation.
But potential is not yet power.
Potential becomes power only when people can find one another, trust one another, organise joint action, build projects, create businesses, transfer knowledge, and connect their efforts to the needs of Ukrainian communities, regions, institutions, and enterprises.
Today, this does not happen systematically enough. There are many Ukrainian organizations, volunteer initiatives, business clubs, cultural associations, professional networks, and civic groups across different countries. They do important work. But their interaction often remains fragmented.
A business owner does not always know where to find a reliable Ukrainian partner in another country. A municipality may not know how to formulate a project in a way that can attract expertise or funding. A young professional may not know how to connect their new skills to Ukrainian development. An investor may not know which initiatives are serious, structured, and implementation-ready.
In other words, Ukraine pays a high tax on fragmentation.
That is why the next stage requires more than another information campaign and more than another social media group. Ukraine needs a trusted digital space for social communication and joint business.
Such a space should not be understood as a conventional social network. A social network connects people and produces content. Ukraine needs something deeper: a digital operating environment where communication, trust, requests, projects, services, business processes, education, and cooperation can be organised in one structured framework.
At the regional level, this role may be performed by eBusinessPlace - not as a narrow marketplace, but as a digital environment for doing business, forming projects, and connecting people around practical needs.
The starting point is simple: every region, community, enterprise, university, hospital, school, NGO, or professional group has needs. These needs may concern equipment, services, training, investment, export channels, rehabilitation programs, construction, digitalisation, logistics, energy efficiency, or workforce development.
But a need expressed informally is not yet a project. A project requires structure: description, responsible parties, budget, timeline, risks, expected results, partners, and measurable indicators. Without this structure, even good ideas often remain conversations.
A digital space for Ukrainian renewal must therefore include a mechanism for collecting and structuring requests.
A community should be able to submit a development need. A business should be able to describe a production or service opportunity. A university should be able to formulate a research or training project. A medical institution should be able to present a modernization requirement. A group of displaced or migrant Ukrainians should be able to propose a cross-border initiative.
The platform must then help transform these requests into structured projects.
This creates the second necessary function: matchmaking.
Ukraine does not lack people. It lacks organized bridges between people. A project in a Ukrainian region may need a German logistics partner, a Polish manufacturer, a Slovak software team, a British advisor, a Canadian donor, or a Ukrainian expert currently living abroad. Today, finding such combinations depends too much on personal networks and chance.
A digital cooperation space can reduce this dependence on chance.
It can connect needs with competencies, projects with experts, SMEs with service providers, communities with donors, students with mentors, and entrepreneurs with potential partners. It can support not only contact, but also verified profiles, reputational history, project documentation, and transparent rules of participation.
The third function is project organisation.
Many initiatives fail not because the idea is weak, but because the process is weak. People do not know who is responsible, what the next step is, how progress is measured, how documents are exchanged, how decisions are recorded, or how results are verified.
A modern digital space should provide simple tools for project initiation, task coordination, document flow, expert review, communication threads, and reporting. These tools do not need to be complex at the beginning. In fact, they should be simple enough for small teams, communities, and SMEs to use immediately.
The fourth function is the organisation of business.
Ukraine’s recovery will not be achieved by grants alone. It must be supported by the creation of new economic links, contracts, service chains, export opportunities, and jobs. Ukrainian businesses inside the country and Ukrainian businesses abroad should be able to find one another, present products and services, form partnerships, and enter value chains.
At this level, eBusinessPlace becomes a practical business layer: a digital environment where SMEs can create verified profiles, present their products and services, issue offers, find contractors, manage basic workflows, prepare documents, organise invoices, and connect to payment, logistics, accounting, and advisory services.
This is especially important for small and medium-sized enterprises. Large companies can afford consultants, lawyers, integrators, and international business development teams. SMEs often cannot. They need affordable, preconfigured, easy-to-use tools that reduce the cost and friction of doing business.
A good digital platform does not replace entrepreneurship. It lowers the barriers around it.
The fifth function is structured interaction with local authorities.
If Ukrainian communities are to become active participants in recovery and development, they need a direct digital channel for communication with businesses, citizens, experts, and Ukrainian networks abroad. Local authorities should be able to publish priorities, collect proposals, coordinate pilot projects, receive expert input, and report results.
This does not mean replacing official state systems. On the contrary, such a platform should complement them. It should serve as a cooperation layer where public authorities, SMEs, civil society, educational institutions, professional groups, and international partners can work together around concrete development tasks.
The sixth function is education and adaptation.
A new digital space will not work if people continue to use it with old habits. More efficient communication requires new skills: how to formulate a request, how to prepare a project, how to build a partnership, how to work in a distributed team, how to verify information, how to protect data, how to use digital tools responsibly, and how to move from discussion to implementation.
This is why educational and enlightenment activity must be built into the platform from the beginning.
It should include short practical courses, project-based learning, mentoring, templates, guides, webinars, and communities of practice. Young Ukrainians should be able to learn through real projects. Experienced professionals should be able to transfer knowledge. SMEs should receive not abstract training, but support directly connected to their daily operations.
In this sense, education becomes not a separate sector, but the cultural and practical foundation of the digital space.
The deeper purpose of such a platform is not merely technical. It is civilisational and organisational.
Ukraine is fighting not only for territory, but for its future form. After the war, the country will face a choice: to restore many of the old institutional weaknesses, or to build more mature mechanisms of cooperation, accountability, innovation, and regional development.
A digital space for social communication and joint business can become one of these mechanisms.
It can help transform geographic dispersion into organised global presence. It can turn forced migration into a network of development. It can convert individual initiatives into shared infrastructure. It can connect Ukrainian communities inside the country with Ukrainian capabilities abroad. It can give practical form to the idea that Ukraine is not limited by its borders, even while remaining a sovereign state rooted in its territory.
This is not an argument for a digital alternative to the state. It is an argument for a digital cooperation layer working with Ukraine, for Ukraine, and around Ukraine.
Such a system should be built carefully. It must respect data protection, avoid technological monopoly, support open standards, ensure portability of information, and preserve the public interest. It should not belong to one political group, one company, or one closed circle. Its governance must be transparent, multi-stakeholder, and oriented toward measurable public value.
The right way to begin is not with a grand system for everything.
The right way is a pilot.
A pilot could focus on several Ukrainian communities, several countries with active Ukrainian networks, and a limited number of practical modules: trusted profiles, a register of needs and projects, a digital showcase of business opportunities, matchmaking services, and basic tools for project coordination.
Within nine to twelve months, such a pilot could test the model not by counting registrations, but by measuring real outcomes: verified organisations, active professional links, structured projects, signed contracts, funded initiatives, jobs created, mentoring pairs, educational trajectories, and solved local problems.
Ukraine’s dispersed human potential should not remain dispersed.
It can become a global network of trust, knowledge, entrepreneurship, innovation, and development. But this requires infrastructure - not only roads, bridges, and buildings, but also digital infrastructure for cooperation.
The future renovation of Ukraine will depend not only on money, but on the country’s ability to organise people, ideas, projects, and business around a shared purpose.
A trusted digital space for social communication and joint business is one of the practical instruments for doing exactly that.

Vassily Buzuyev is a Ukrainian IT executive and institutional design specialist. He is a board member of the Central and East European Institute for Strategic Studies in Vienna