The Ministry of Economy and Environment of Ukraine has launched Ukraine's first AI-powered voice assistant to handle incoming calls to the State Employment Service. As the ongoing war reshapes expectations for public services, government support must remain accessible at any time, regardless of the security situation. The new solution is already operating in pilot mode, helping ensure uninterrupted service even when human operators are unable to answer calls, including during air raid alerts or outside business hours.

The U.S.–Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund (URIF) held its fourth board meeting on Wednesday, June 24, on the sidelines of the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdańsk, Poland. At the meeting, URIF’s Board of Directors discussed the landmark cooperation agreement between the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) – the home of the World Bank Group Guarantee Platform – that will support Political Risk Insurance (PRI) for URIF investments. The cooperation agreement will help URIF leverage catalytic donor capital and mobilize significant private financing to develop and rebuild Ukraine’s critical infrastructure and industries. The Board also approved items to further operationalize URIF, including a critical minerals offtake initial whitelist.  

Representatives of international financial institutions, donor organisations, humanitarian demining operators, businesses, and the Government of Ukraine discussed how to integrate humanitarian demining into recovery programmes, attract a broader range of investors, and develop financing mechanisms to accelerate the return of land to safe use.

The “Soul of Soil: Dishes from Demined Fields” campaign, which brought together 12 Kyiv restaurants around the topic of humanitarian demining, raised UAH 120,446 in support of the Humanitarian Demining direction of the UNITED24 fundraising platform.

The selection stage of the Minesight Innovation Challenge — an international engineering competition dedicated to excavation, one of the most difficult, hazardous, and resource-intensive stages of humanitarian demining — has concluded.