Six million Ukrainian reservists now manage their military records on a mobile app built during active combat. The person who built it is coming to SmallSat Europe.
Kateryna Chernohorenko served as Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Defence for Digital Development, Digital Transformation, and Digitalization from September 2023 to July 2025. In that period, she oversaw the digitization of military administration across an armed forces engaged in the largest land war in Europe since 1945. Her team launched Reserve+, a mobile application for military records and recruitment used by more than six million reservists and conscripts, and Army+, a companion app for active service members that consolidated e-reports, training, cross-unit transfers, and personnel services into a single platform. She eliminated 16 paper property accounting logs and consolidated 12 personnel logs into one digital document. The DELTA battlefield management system, which she scaled across the Defence Forces, achieved certification under NATO standards.
The defense technology footprint extended beyond field applications. Chernohorenko led the IT Coalition within the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a partnership of 17 countries that mobilized more than €1.1 billion to strengthen the Ministry of Defence’s IT infrastructure. In March 2025, she drove the creation of the Space Policy Directorate within the Ministry of Defence, a unit tasked with developing regulatory frameworks for military space activities and coordinating with domestic and international partners. SatNews reported in April 2026 on the UASAT joint venture between GomSpace and STETMAN, one of the first commercial outcomes of Ukraine’s push toward sovereign satellite communications.
The broader context is strategic. SatNews examined defense economics and the European smallsat market in March 2026, tracking how institutional demand from NATO member states is reshaping procurement patterns across the continent. Ukraine’s experience, where digital systems were stress-tested under sustained combat, offers a dataset that no simulation can replicate.
Chernohorenko left government in July 2025 and is now a senior lecturer at the Kyiv-Mohyla School of Government, where she teaches e-governance, document management, and digital democracy.
At SmallSat Europe, Chernohorenko joins Duncan McKenzie of Space Exchange Global for a fireside chat titled “Defence Innovation and Ukraine’s Space Imperative.”
The apps were built under fire. The question now is what Europe learns from the experience.
