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aiming for government bodies to offer all their services in digital, paperless format by 2021. This will be the result of the Diya digitalization program being launched in February, which has enabled the opening of digital passports, securing of building permits and the registration of individual entrepreneurs, among other online services now available. More than 5mn Ukrainians have used the Diya mobile app as part of the State in a Smartphone program, which Zelensky characterized as the start of a new reality.
The US Microsoft Corp. and Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation have agreed to cooperate in what would grow to become a $500 million partnerships to put much of Ukraine’s digital information inside Microsoft’s Azure cloud. ​“One of the priority goals of our ministry is to digitize 100% of public services in two and a half years,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Digital Transformation minister, said on October 2 at the signing of a joint memorandum of understanding in Kyiv. “This cannot be done if there is no data center in which this data will be stored in our country. In fact, Microsoft may become the first large-scale project that will help us realize our ambitious goal.” The partnership is also to contribute to the upgrading of skills 100,000 Ukrainian IT workers through 2024.
9.1.8 ​Tourism sector news
Ukraine’s hotel operators will need two years to recover from the last six months of corona crisis​, Natalia Chystiakova, consulting director for Colliers International (Ukraine), predicts in an interview with Interfax Ukraine. Last summer the average occupancy of Kyiv’s hotels fell to 20%. Four- and five-star hotels were hard hit because of the loss of conference and difficulty of closing and losing trained staff. If strict quarantine and air travel controls return, she predicts, several hotels could close permanently.
Over the last four months, 500,000 Ukrainian tourists vacationed in Antalya, ​the Turkish Mediterranean often called the Turkish Riviera. Responding to the corona pandemic with the Safe Tourism Certificate program, Turkish officials believe they saved the second half of their peak season. Last year, 1.6 million Ukrainians flew to Antalya, Nadir Alpaslan, Turkey’s deputy culture and tourism minister, told a meeting of Turkey-Ukraine Joint Tourism Commission in the Antalya, reports Anadolu Agency.
9.1.9 ​Utilities sector news
Ukraine’s $300mn, largely US-financed storage facility for spent nuclear fuel​ will be completed by the end of this year, Petr Kotin, acting head of Energoatom, assured reporters Friday. Scheduled to open next spring, the storage facility is to save Ukraine $150-200mn a year in payments to Russia, the current destination for Ukraine’s spent fuel. Of the total cost, $250mn is financed by a loan from the United States International Development Finance Corporation, formerly known as the Overseas Private Investment Corp. Using the dry storage technology of Holtec International, a Florida-based firm, the facility near Chornobyl, in northern Kyiv region, to take the fuel by rail from nine commercial reactors in three power plants – Rivne, Khmelnytskyi, and Yuzhnukrainska in Mykolaiv. Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe with six reactors at 5,700 mw capacity, has stored its spent fuel on site with dry storage since 2001.
Westinghouse Electric Co signed a deal on October 4 to raise its market
61​ UKRAINE Country Report​ November 2020 ​ ​www.intellinews.com