James Pearce, TelecomTV (00:05):
Hello and welcome to TelecomTV. I'm James Pearce and I'm in Vienna for Network X. I'm delighted to be joined today by Volodymyr Lutchenko, who's the chief operating officer at Kyivstar. Thank you so much for joining us today. Now that's a role that you've recently taken on, I believe. How's it going so far and what do your day-to-day responsibilities look like?

Volodymyr Lutchenko, Kyivstar (00:25):
So since we became the holding group, we have six companies in the group and it's, let's say the time for real internal reorganisation and making everything in order. So the idea is to make the telecom as a separated pillar, separated organisation, and the COO will be in charge of telecom business. As of now, we are in the process of, let's say organisation establishment, process rearrangement, this is like the internal work.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (01:05):
Obviously with everything that's going on in Ukraine, satellite has become a really important part of the connectivity structure there. Can you talk about how important it has been to your services and being able to keep up services and where is next on the satellite journey for Kyivstar?

Volodymyr Lutchenko, Kyivstar (01:23):
We have launched a satellite service for all our subscribers free of charge last year, November, in November 2025. The first service, it was the only SMS. Since June, July 2026, we have launched light data. That data package includes WhatsApp, Viber, and Google Maps. For us, just for understanding, for us, it's not kind of like business idea or money-earning idea. This is the one more layer of national resilience, company resilience, network resilience. Because let's say if you are able to send the SMS of last hope, it's worth it.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (02:15):
I mean, resilience is such an important issue. Let's stick with that for now. Discuss the importance of resilience and how it can be a strategic advantage for operators.

Volodymyr Lutchenko, Kyivstar (02:27):
Oh, that's very good question actually. I tried to cover the topic yesterday during my presentation, how we consider the resilience. Of course, we started because we had to do, because all the challenges coming to us at the same time and the resilience was investment and resilience was our answer to that. But as of now, what we see that any commercial requests, for example, from the big enterprise, the requests are coming for the special services and there is a special articles about the resiliency of the services. So the business needs not only services, but they have to be sure that those services will work during next 24 hours blackouts or 72 hours blackouts. And if you are not able to provide that, then you are out of market. This is the change in the competition.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (03:24):
So another hot topic in the industry at the moment that I think is really relevant with you guys is sovereignty, network sovereignty and around services as well. What lessons can the rest of the industry learn from Kyivstar when it comes to sovereignty and ownership and trust in the network, especially in the context of what you guys are facing, which is extreme adversity?

Volodymyr Lutchenko, Kyivstar (03:47):
That's very, very difficult question. Sovereignty and everything related to that. Of course, the ideal case would be all the network data processing... But as of now, it's a bit difficult to implement. So that's why we always have to balance to provide service, make it reliable or theoretical threats. So as of now, we are more practical. We are trying to resolve all the challenges coming to us with what we can do.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (04:23):
Well, thank you so much for joining us today on TelecomTV.

Volodymyr Lutchenko, Kyivstar (04:26):
Thank you.