Kyivstar and Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation Select Google Gemma as the Foundation for Ukraine’s National LLM

Dubai and Kyiv, December 1, 2025: VEON Ltd. (Nasdaq: VEON), announces that Kyivstar (Nasdaq: KYIV; KYIVW), together with the WINWIN AI Center of Excellence under Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, has selected Google Gemma as the base model for developing Ukrainian LLM, Ukraine’s own national large language model (“LLM”), leveraging Google’s Vertex AI infrastructure for computing power.

As a strategic partner in this project, Kyivstar will operationally lead the development of Ukrainian LLM. The national language model aims to capture the full breadth of Ukrainian dialects, terminology, history, and context—while keeping sensitive national data securely stored and processed within Ukraine, an essential requirement for sectors such as government, healthcare, and financial services.

Google was selected after extensive evaluation, by reinforcing the technological and economic ties between Ukraine and the United States—ties that were further deepened by Kyivstar’s Nasdaq listing in August 2025. By anchoring the project on an open-source model from a global technology leader, Ukraine is positioning itself to build an LLM that reflects the country’s linguistic depth and cultural identity, while also addressing security requirements.

“We are building the Ukrainian LLM on a ready-made open-source model. The main task in development is to train it on our unique data further. When choosing a model, we focused on how well it already handles Ukrainian-language texts and how controllable it is during additional training. This will help minimize linguistic and ethical risks in our LLM,” said Danylo Tsvok, Chief AI Officer at the Ministry of Digital Transformation and CEO of the WINWIN AI Center of Excellence.

“Kyivstar and the Ukrainian Digital Ministry have taken a major step forward today. With a sovereign Ukrainian LLM, Ukrainian consumers, businesses and government institutions will be empowered to integrate cutting-edge technologies using augmented intelligence that truly speaks Ukrainian and understands Ukraine,” said Kaan Terzioglu, CEO of VEON Group. “We have a responsibility to bring the benefits of augmented intelligence to the countries we serve — through large language models trained not only on words, but on local context.”

Once completed, the Ukrainian LLM is expected to serve as the foundation for a new generation of AI-powered services across the public and private sectors in Ukraine. Potential use cases range from regulatory and legal analysis tools to domain-specific solutions in education, finance, healthcare, and beyond. By training the model on Ukrainian data, Kyivstar aims to deliver more accurate, locally relevant, and actionable outputs than general-purpose global models.

Krzysztof Kaziów, Director Customer Engineering CEE, Google Cloud said, "We are honored that the Ministry of Digital Transformation and Kyivstar have selected Gemma as the foundation for the Ukrainian national LLM. This choice underscores Gemma's strategic value, offering an optimal balance between performance and resources alongside its strong multilingual support. Leveraging its proven success as the base for leading Ukrainian LLMs, we are committed to supporting this vital initiative to enhance digital experience in Ukraine."

Kyivstar will first optimize Gemma for Ukrainian, refine the tokenizer, and train the model on curated Ukrainian datasets. Dedicated benchmarks will guide future fine-tuning and application-specific adaptation.

The initiative builds on VEON’s broader strategy to close the AI language gap across its markets. Following KazLLM in Kazakhstan and the Urdu LLM initiative in Pakistan, the Ukrainian LLM represents VEON’s next step in empowering digital ecosystems with locally relevant AI. 

About Kyivstar

Kyivstar Group Ltd. is a Nasdaq-listed holding company that operates JSC Kyivstar, Ukraine’s leading digital operator and the first Ukrainian company to have its shares traded on a U.S. stock exchange. Kyivstar Group’s operations span a broad range of connectivity and digital services, including mobile and fixed-line voice and data, ride-hailing, e-health, digital TV, and enterprise solutions such as Big Data, cloud, and cybersecurity. Together with VEON, Kyivstar intends to invest USD 1 billion in Ukraine between 2023-2027, through investments in infrastructure and technological development, charitable donations and strategic acquisitions. For more information, please visit . Nasdaq tickers: KYIV; KYIVW

About VEON

VEON is a digital operator that provides converged connectivity and digital services to nearly 150 million connectivity and 120 million digital users. Operating across five countries that are home to more than 6% of the world’s population, VEON is transforming lives through technology-driven services that empower individuals and drive economic growth. VEON is listed on NASDAQ. For more information, visit: .

Forward-Looking Statements

This release contains “forward-looking statements”, within the meaning of the Section 27A of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Such forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, the timing and impact of the development of Ukrainian LLM. There are numerous risks, uncertainties that could cause actual results and performance to differ materially from those expressed by such statements, including risks relating to the timing and impact of the development of Ukrainian LLM, among others discussed in the section entitled “Risk Factors” in VEON’s 2024 Form 20-F filed with the SEC on April 25, 2025 and other public filings made by VEON with the SEC. The forward-looking statements contained herein speak only as of the date of this release and VEON disclaims any obligation to update them, except as required by law

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