On June 18, 2026, Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation and Ministry of Justice quietly opened beta testing for a service that most governments have never attempted: a fully remote divorce, conducted entirely through a smartphone app. Couples without minor children can now dissolve their marriage via a digital application on Diia, a video conference with a civil registry official, and postal delivery of the certificate—no in-person visit required at any step.
This is not a wartime workaround. It is the logical endpoint of a six-year project to rebuild the Ukrainian state as a digital-first institution, and one of the clearest demonstrations yet that emergency conditions can accelerate—rather than delay—institutional reform.
The Platform Behind the Policy
Diia (Ukrainian for "state and me") launched in February 2020 as a mobile wallet for government documents. By October 2025 it had reached 23 million users—approximately 81 percent of Ukrainians over the age of 14—making it one of Europe's most widely adopted digital government platforms. The app now carries more than 70 government services and 33 digital documents, from driver's licences and tax IDs to war damage claims and military bond purchases. In December 2025 it was recognised as Europe's top GovTech solution for citizens.
The divorce service did not arrive from nowhere. In September 2024, Ukraine launched the world's first fully online marriage ceremony—application, video ceremony with a registrar, and electronic certificate all delivered through Diia. The uptake was immediate: 24,261 couples were married online in the first eleven months of 2025 alone. The divorce service is the civil-registry inverse of that same infrastructure, and it follows the same design logic: retain the legally required waiting period and official oversight, but strip out every unnecessary physical step.
How It Works
Eligibility for the beta is deliberately narrow. Both partners must be adult Ukrainian citizens with a verified taxpayer identification number (RNOKPP), a valid ID card or biometric passport linked to Diia, and a marriage record in the state civil acts register. Crucially, the couple must have no common minor children. Joint property disputes or custody questions place a dissolution beyond this service's scope and remain with the courts.
The process has four stages. Both partners separately register through diia.gov.ua; instructions are emailed to each. A mandatory waiting period follows—required under Ukrainian family law to allow either party to withdraw consent. After that period, both join a video conference with a civil registry specialist who conducts the state registration of dissolution. The paper certificate is then dispatched by post and delivered in person within Ukraine.
The one-month-plus waiting interval is not a bug. Ukraine's Family Code has long required this cooling-off period for non-judicial divorces—a protection that critics of digital-first services often demand, and which the Diia implementation preserves in full.
The Case for Caution—and Why the Safeguards Hold
The strongest objection to remote divorce is coercion: without in-person contact, how does the state verify that both parties are acting freely? It is a serious concern. Domestic abuse organisations in other countries have documented cases where a controlling partner applied pressure remotely. The video conference with a registrar is the primary safeguard here, and its robustness depends on training registrars to identify signs of duress and on the ability to pause or refuse registration where consent appears compromised.
A second concern is finality. The certificate is delivered to each party individually; the restriction to deliveries within Ukraine means the service currently excludes the several million Ukrainians abroad. The Ministry has not announced a timeline for extending it internationally.
Those limitations are real, but they are calibrations, not fundamental flaws. The existing non-judicial divorce at a civil registry office—which this service replaces for eligible couples—offered no more coercion protection than a registrar conversation. The online format, if anything, introduces a logged video record that physical office visits do not provide.
Ukraine as Governance Laboratory
It is worth being direct about what Ukraine has achieved since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022. With millions of citizens displaced, hundreds of thousands of military personnel deployed, and government offices damaged or inaccessible, the pressure to make civic services remote was acute. The response has been systematic rather than piecemeal.
Marriage, divorce, business registration, tax filing, property damage claims, and benefit applications have all migrated online. Mykhailo Fedorov—who led the Ministry of Digital Transformation from 2019 until January 2026, when he was appointed Minister of Defence—built Diia into a platform that other governments now actively study. Estonia's X-Road system is often cited as the benchmark for digital government infrastructure; Ukraine's Diia has now matched it in citizen adoption rates and begun to exceed it in the breadth of life-cycle services offered.
The question other governments should ask is not whether Ukraine's circumstances are replicable—they are obviously exceptional—but whether the constraints that make in-person civil registry visits mandatory elsewhere are legal requirements or merely inherited assumptions. In most democratic systems, the legal requirement is that a competent official witness and record a civil act. Whether that official is physically present has rarely been tested.
What Comes Next
The beta is explicitly a test run. The Ministry has invited couples to participate and provide feedback before a full public launch, and the announcement explicitly frames the process as iterative: participant feedback will shape the final service design. That is good practice. The online marriage service went through a similar beta phase before the 24,000-plus adoptions of 2025.
For a country managing an active war, a collapsed birth rate, and a diaspora of uncertain return, keeping civil services accessible is not an administrative nicety—it is a tool for maintaining the social fabric of a mobile, displaced population. Ukraine is betting that a state people can carry in their pocket is a state they will stay connected to, wherever they are.