15 April, 17:39
Ukraine in 2026 is a country whose technology sector generates the equivalent of well over a billion dollars in taxes annually, accounting for more than three percent of GDP. It is a country that built one of the world's most sophisticated digital governance systems from scratch.
A country developing its own large language model, harmonizing its laws with European Union standards, and fighting — at enormous cost — for the right to belong to the Western order. And yet it is also a country whose authors Google will not allow to sell books on its platform.
Not because of any technical obstacle. Not for lack of demand. Purely because of a corporate classification that placed Ukraine in the category of "unsupported" — alongside Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Two Googles in one ecosystem
The convenient fiction of the digital marketplace is that it is singular and universal. Google Play is not. It is a confederation of divisions with separate engineering teams, separate legal agreements and separate internal priorities. Google Play Console for app developers and Google Play Books Partner Center are two entirely different bureaucratic machines. The fact that one is open to Ukraine says nothing about the other.
Ukrainian developers can publish apps. Ukrainian authors cannot publish books. The hryvnia has been supported as a payout currency in the app marketplace since 2014. In the books division, it does not exist as a currency at all. Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic all have full access to the books platform. Greece and Estonia do not — but Greece and Estonia are EU member states not currently defending their territory from a land invasion. Their exclusion is anomalous. Ukraine's is structural.
The wall appears at a specific point in the Partner Center registration process: Step 2, "Set up payment profile." The system rejects Ukraine as a country of residence. Even an author with a foreign bank account cannot proceed, because Google requires proof of tax residency in whichever country appears in the seller profile — and if the bank's country of origin does not match, the payment profile simply does not activate. The rejection is never stated plainly. It materializes where the form runs out.
The fiscal logic of exclusion
Google offers no public explanation. But the regulatory environment makes the corporate reasoning legible enough.
Since January 1, 2022, Ukraine has enforced a law — informally known as the "Google tax" — requiring non-resident technology companies to register as VAT payers at a rate of 20 percent on digital services provided to Ukrainian individuals. Google is officially registered under this law. Non-resident companies collectively paid more than the equivalent of 300 million dollars in VAT in 2024 alone. But that is the logic of taxing consumption. The logic of paying royalties to authors is categorically different.
The moment Google begins disbursing royalties to thousands of individuals in a jurisdiction with its own specific VAT regime for digital services, every transaction requires classification: is this B2C, or a payment to a registered sole proprietor? If the author is registered as a private entrepreneur, the question of reverse charge and double taxation arises immediately. Beyond that, selling books priced in U.S. dollars requires authors to complete W-8BEN forms to avoid IRS withholding obligations. Since Google has not established automated tax information exchange with Ukrainian authorities for the publishing sector, the company resolved the problem in the simplest way available: it removed the country from the supported list entirely.
The fine for a registration or reporting error under Ukrainian law is thirty times the minimum wage. For a corporation with billion-dollar revenues, that is a rounding error. But the legal overhead of building a compliant billing infrastructure for two simultaneous jurisdictions — the IRS and the Ukrainian tax authority — in a market with lower margins than gaming or cloud services is a real calculation. Ukraine lost it.
The Wise illusion
There is a separate, more practical wall: financial verification itself.
Google uses a micro-deposit system to confirm bank accounts, which requires the correspondent bank to support specific electronic funds transfer protocols. Under Ukraine's wartime currency controls, the National Bank permits receipt of royalties as service exports — but automating high-volume, low-value transactions through that corridor collides with financial monitoring requirements that were not designed for this use case.
The standard workaround — using Wise or Payoneer to obtain a virtual account at a U.S. or European bank — has been closing steadily. Through 2025 and into 2026, both Amazon and Google have been systematically rejecting accounts from these services, classifying them as not originating from full deposit-taking institutions. The bridge that workaround built is being dismantled from the other side.
Compliance as collective punishment
There is a third layer, one that corporate communications rarely acknowledge but that demonstrably shapes these decisions.
Google's compliance division is bound by U.S. and EU sanctions regimes that prohibit providing services in occupied territories — Crimea, and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Automated geolocation and transaction monitoring systems cannot cleanly determine the status of banks whose branches operate in areas where the front line moves, or which have been touched by sectoral sanctions. Rather than engineer a precision instrument for this problem, the corporation elevates the risk rating for the entire region and stops there.
This is rational risk management from a compliance perspective. It is also a form of collective punishment for authors who live in Kharkiv, Lviv or Dnipro and have no connection to occupied territory whatsoever.
The contrast with Russia is instructive. Google fully suspended monetization and developer payouts in Russia in December 2024, citing the impossibility of guaranteeing transactions outside sanctioned banks. Russia is a sanctioned aggressor — and Google cut it off explicitly and completely. Ukraine is the victim of that aggression and a candidate for EU membership — and Google holds it in a status it never formally announces: a gray zone with neither full access nor an official refusal.
The cost of invisibility
The visible loss is financial — the royalties authors do not receive. The invisible loss is cultural, and it compounds over time.
More than 70 percent of smartphones in Ukraine run on Android. Google Play Books is a native application on those devices. When a reader searches for a Ukrainian author through the built-in service and finds nothing, the book does not exist for them. It has not been banned; it has simply been made invisible by the architecture of distribution. An author who does manage to reach the platform through a third-party aggregator — and pays accordingly — will receive in practice not the 70 percent royalty Google advertises, but closer to 52 percent, after aggregator fees and the automatic price-matching against Amazon that Google reserves the right to apply under its terms of service.
Ukraine's Translate Ukraine initiative supports the translation of 100 Ukrainian titles into 30 languages in 2026. But translation without distribution is a manuscript in a drawer. If an author cannot independently manage their presence on the world's largest digital books platform for Android users, the international potential of those translations is severely constrained before it begins.
Why this should embarrass Google
The Ministry of Digital Transformation has successfully attracted billions in investment through Diia.City. Negotiations with Google over Books Partner Center have, by all available indications, produced nothing — because the e-book market does not register as strategically significant compared to gaming and IT services. Publishing remains a digital exile in an ecosystem where Ukraine is already present as a consumer, a taxpayer and a technology partner.
Two factors could alter this. The Digital Markets Act, as Ukraine's legal harmonization with EU norms advances, could eventually obligate Google to unify its terms for candidate countries the same way it has already updated commission structures for the European Economic Area. And the normalization of Ukraine's banking system after the end of the war will eliminate the transaction-monitoring complications that make the current exclusion administratively convenient for the corporation.
Until then, the situation is what it is. One of the most powerful corporations in the world treats authors from a country fighting for its survival and its place in the democratic order the same way it treats authors from states that never wanted that order and never will. Formal equality between the unequal has a name. It is discrimination.