On August 21, 2026, Kyiv hosted the UNITED24 MODE Summit, marking four years since President Volodymyr Zelenskyy launched UNITED24 – Ukraine's official fundraising platform – in April 2022. Ambassadors, partners, medics, engineers, and volunteers spent the day taking stock of what four years of collective effort have built. Xpand's team was there among them, as a company that has partnered with UNITED24 over the past year.
The number that opened the summit is hard to take in at first: close to $4 billion raised, from donors in 145 countries. It isn't an abstraction. Behind it are more than 117,000 pieces of medical equipment – ambulances, armored evacuation vehicles, anesthesia machines, neurosurgical microscopes – worth over $51 million, along with drones, reconstructed schools, and rebuilt bridges.
The summit's name spells out what it stands for: MODE – Innovative, Just, Resilient, Bold, United. Its eight panels were built around that idea, and several are worth recounting.
Ukraine in the Spotlight opened the day with a conversation about the country's place in the global information space – how Ukraine holds attention and stays part of the international agenda, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, UNITED24's own editorial team, and independent investors weighing in from different angles.
Ukrainian Defense Tech looked at how the country built a domestic drone and defense industry nearly from scratch since 2022, and what it takes to keep scaling it responsibly.
The Power of Voice brought together actors Katheryn Winnick and Liev Schreiber with Mstyslav Chernov – the war correspondent and Academy Award–winning director of 20 Days in Mariupol. The panel wasn't about donation totals; it was about words and creative work as tools in their own right, and about how film, journalism, and public advocacy keep Ukraine's reality visible to a global audience that has plenty of other things competing for its attention. The framing that stood out to our team: on that stage, Ukraine wasn't presented as a victim asking for sympathy. It's a country producing some of the most-watched investigative journalism and battlefield documentation in the world right now – treated, accordingly, as a leader in the field.
Ukrainian Medics Bring Hope Back featured Dr. Borys Todurov, the cardiac surgeon behind some of Ukraine's highest-profile heart transplants, alongside UNICEF's Dr. Kateryna Bulavinova and combat medics from the 1st Separate Medical Battalion. Discussing what wartime medicine looks like today, doctors described testing drone transport for donor hearts and lungs – an idea that would have sounded far-fetched four years ago, now being piloted to shorten the delivery window that keeps a transplant viable.
Demine Ukraine turned to a quieter, longer war: clearing land contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance. GSC Game World – the studio behind S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 – announced a second joint fundraiser, a collectible raffle aiming to raise $100,000 for humanitarian demining in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, alongside Ukraine's Humanitarian Demining Foundation.