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Freiuk joins Uklon after nearly nine years at Kyivstar to head government relations. 18:05, 21.09.2026 Artem Freiuk, senior corporate affairs manager at Ukraine's largest mobile operator Kyivstar, after nearly nine years with the company has decided to join the Uklon team, a subsidiary of Kyivstar Group, as head of government relations. "After nearly nine important, eventful and very interesting years at Kyivstar, it is time to move on... I am sincerely happy to become part of a top Ukrainian company that is actively developing, creating technology products and being part of the lives of millions of people every day," Freiuk wrote on Facebook on Monday. He thanked Kyivstar and its managers for the experience, challenges and strong projects. Freiuk's LinkedIn profile says that since December 2024 he has been co-chair of the American Chamber of Commerce (ACC) Personal Data Protection Committee, and since July 2024 co-chair of the European Business Association (EBA) Lobbying and Transparent Policies Committee. Uklon, which was consolidated into Kyivstar's financial statements in April 2025, posted UAH 1.448 billion in revenue, or $32.8 million, in the second quarter of 2026. Its EBITDA amounted to UAH 554 million, or $12.5 million. The number of booked rides increased 4.5% to 43 million during the period, while completed deliveries rose 25.9% to 1.4 million. The number of the company's digital active users increased 8.2% to 5.2 million in the second quarter of this year. The most immediate challenges for Uklon's government relations function include implementation of the law on digital platforms, a draft law on the taxi market and creating conditions for autonomous taxis to operate in Ukraine, which currently accounts for 98% of the Kyivstar subsidiary's business.

Kyivstar launches travel eSIM with 5GB from UAH 90. Kyivstar has moved beyond conventional roaming with Travel SIM, a standalone, data-only eSIM built for Ukrainians travelling abroad - including people who use Vodafone Ukraine, lifecell or another operator at home. The offer covers 38 countries and starts at UAH 90 for 5GB, positioning Kyivstar unusually close to the specialist travel eSIM market. It is not an add-on to a customer's existing tariff. Travel SIM comes with a separate number, works alongside the user's main SIM and provides mobile data only, according to Kyivstar's product page. One eSIM, four packages. Kyivstar is keeping the opening range deliberately simple. Each package is valid for four weeks: * 5GB - UAH 90 * 10GB - UAH 135 * 20GB - UAH 225 * 40GB - UAH 400 There is no recurring subscription and no automatic renewal. Once the allowance is used, data stops rather than generating pay-as-you-go overage charges. Users can buy another package through the My Kyivstar app, while unused data expires at the end of the four weeks. There is, however, one detail travellers should notice before buying: the package starts immediately after payment. That is less flexible than travel eSIMs whose validity begins only when the device first connects to a supported network. Buying a Travel SIM several weeks before departure would therefore waste part of its usable period. Built to sit beside your main number. Setup follows the familiar eSIM routine: buy online, receive a QR code and install the profile in the phone's settings. The main Ukrainian SIM can remain active for calls, messages and verification codes, while Travel SIM handles data abroad. The product itself does not support standard voice calls or SMS, and its data cannot be used in Ukraine. That makes it a poor fit for travellers who need one line for everything, use a phone without eSIM support or want mobile data in destinations such as Switzerland, Canada, Japan or Egypt, which are absent from the launch list. Kyivstar also says it guarantees compatibility only with eSIM-capable devices certified in Ukraine. Carrier-locked phones and some iPhone models with two physical SIM slots are specifically excluded. Where it works. The 38-country footprint is heavily European, but it also includes several important long-haul markets: * Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bulgaria and Croatia * Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland and France * Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland and Italy * Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Malta * Moldova, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal and Romania * Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom * South Korea, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United States One profile works across the entire footprint, so a traveller moving from Poland to Germany and then France does not need to install another eSIM. A carrier product with travel-eSIM logic. Commercially, Travel SIM is more interesting than a routine roaming promotion. Kyivstar is selling connectivity independently of the customer's domestic mobile relationship. In effect, it is competing for the "second SIM" position on any compatible Ukrainian phone. That puts the offer in the same broad category as Airalo's 41-country Europe eSIM and Holafly's unlimited Europe plans, while Yesim's Pay & Fly extends a persistent, pay-as-you-go eSIM across more than 170 countries. Kyivstar's narrower coverage is the obvious compromise. Its advantages are local pricing in hryvnia, a familiar Ukrainian brand, simple bundles and very low entry costs. The product page could still be more transparent. Travellers would benefit from seeing the partner network in each country, whether 5G is available, expected speed policies and explicit hotspot rules before checkout. Moving activation from payment to first overseas connection would also make advance installation safer and more convenient. More on Alertify Follow the latest Kyivstar news Telecom developments, 4G & 5G network expansions, fiber broadband, direct-to-cell satellite coverage, digital platform updates, and infrastructure news from Kyivstar. Conclusion. Kyivstar's claim that this is the first separate travel eSIM launched by a Ukrainian operator matters less than what the launch signals. Traditional operators are no longer leaving travel eSIMs entirely to digital specialists; they are beginning to copy their best idea - separating international data from the customer's main mobile plan. That direction fits the wider market. GSMA Intelligence reports that consumer awareness of eSIM doubled from 25% to 50% in two years, while the GSMA's 2026 eSIM Summit said 73% of mobile operators now offer commercial eSIM services. The next contest is no longer simply roaming versus eSIM. It is about who gives travellers the clearest package, the easiest activation and the strongest cross-border value. For a Ukrainian traveller visiting one or more of the 38 supported markets, Kyivstar has made a compelling first offer. For unlimited usage, broader global coverage, voice services or longer validity, specialist travel eSIMs, an existing roaming benefit or a local SIM may still be the smarter choice.

Large language models for small language communities are essential. Mobile network operators can help build AI systems that reflect local cultures * Many developing economies cannot access AI systems such as ChatGPT, owing to their language biases. IMAGE: REUTERS Published Fri, Aug 21, 2026 · 10:59 AM [LONDON] Much has been said about artificial intelligence's security and military risks. But the cultural and economic threats posed by large language models (LLMs) trained on a limited number of languages and owned by a handful of multinational companies have been largely overlooked. The market dominance of these LLMs leaves developing countries with minority languages at a distinct disadvantage. Ever since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, industry leaders and policymakers have touted AI's potential to improve society by revolutionising healthcare and education, as well as by driving productivity growth and income gains. But these benefits are not equally shared. Many developing economies cannot access these AI systems, owing to their language biases. Most LLMs are trained on only 100 or so of the more than 7,000 languages spoken around the world, with English and the other Big Five "high-resource" languages - Chinese, Spanish, French and German - accounting for nearly all of the data used. But only 400 million people are native English speakers, and just 25 per cent of the global population speaks one of the Big Five as their first language. This imbalance could lead to cultural and economic isolation in the short term, and strangle growth and diminish linguistic diversity in the long term. There is also the bitter irony that rich countries' rapid adoption of AI, supported by a massive buildout of data centres equipped with ever more powerful compute infrastructure, has made it harder for users in developing countries to access the Internet and benefit from digital tools. Asean intelligence. Get insights into businesses across South-east Asia The AI-driven chip demand has raised the cost of smartphones, putting them out of reach for millions of people. LLMs must better reflect local languages and cultures. Otherwise, communities risk losing their unique lexicons, long shaped by historical events, mass migrations and political legacies. Moreover, the current lack of language diversity in AI systems will slow adoption. Digital financial services in Peru must communicate colloquially to be relevant to consumers. To deliver effective treatment, online healthcare in Vietnam requires the clarity that only a native language model can provide. Mobile network operators (MNOs) are uniquely positioned to create "local" language models, owing to their armies of developers and data-processing capabilities. They are also licensed and trusted government partners. This is important because a major barrier to creating LLMs for minority languages is the lack of training data. The solution lies in the huge amounts of data held by governments, which tend to be sensitive and confidential. For example, Ukraine's largest MNO, Kyivstar, created a partnership with the Ministry of Digital Transformation to develop the country's first national LLM, which was tailored to Ukrainian as well as other languages spoken in the country, including Russian, Bulgarian and Crimean Tatar. Complicating the task was the fact that much of the literature in Ukraine was written under Russian rule and thus considered culturally inappropriate. As a result, four advisory committees with binding authority over the model's technical, legal, cultural, historical and linguistic aspects guided the curation of training texts. The Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA), of which I am director general, is pursuing a similar strategy in much of sub-Saharan Africa, including Nigeria, Madagascar, Togo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, through the African AI Language Models project. The initiative is bringing together the continent's Group of Six MNOs - Airtel, Axian Telecom, Ethio Telecom, MTN, Orange and Vodacom - and other telecommunications companies, public and private actors, academics and civil-society groups to build scalable and inclusive LLMs for African languages. To scale AI startups that generate positive socioeconomic outcomes for the underserved, GSMA has launched the EmergingTech programme, funded by the United Kingdom's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Its first cohort includes ToumAI, which creates voice interfaces in Morocco's local dialects to help low-literate, rural users access digital and financial services through simple spoken commands, and Wiseyak, which is developing a multilingual mix-code conversational AI solution to help reduce Nepal's digital divide. These initiatives are extremely important as the world moves from prompt-driven to agentic AI. Digital services such as banking, healthcare and education are increasingly embedding AI to assist users and will become crucial to supporting lives and livelihoods. Firms, too, are benefiting from open-source models. Investment in local AI creates a virtuous circle for developing economies, generating a pool of tech talent that is critical to digital independence. As concerns over data and data-processing sovereignty grow, these economies must improve operational control and governance over the deployment of agentic AI. That means collaborating with developers and MNOs to build minority language models that meet their society's needs. PROJECT SYNDICATE The writer is director general of the Global System for Mobile Communications Association Share with us your feedback on BT's products and services