Resilience, Reconstruction, Recovery: The Path Ahead for Ukraine

Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine is of immense consequence. Estimates of the cost of reconstruction - ranging as high as $1 trillion - do not fully capture the significance of the situation. Failing to restore Ukraine's sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the security and prosperity of its citizens will cost trillions of dollars more in increased conflict, reduced development, and fractured leadership.

Political commitment among Ukraine's Western allies to reconstruction and recovery is robust. Material commitment, on the other hand, lags. To date, Western governments, intergovernmental organizations, and international financial institutions have allocated just under $80 bn to Ukraine's postwar recovery, a fraction of a fraction of what will be needed. A holistic understanding of the urgency of the task is similarly lacking. Donors have rightly focused on the necessities of the war, but they have wrongly assumed that the job of recovery can only begin once the fighting has stopped. If recovery is to be real, the work must begin now.

To help galvanize this conversation, the Center for European Policy Analysis and the Kyiv School of Economics have drawn together four key pillars of recovery and reconstruction: economics and finance, Ukrainian reform, Western political will, and the postwar security architecture. Each of these pillars is vital to the stability of the edifice as a whole, and each must be addressed in parallel.

Seen from this multi-domain perspective, there are four tasks of reconstruction and recovery: 
1. Maximizing wartime resilience in the face of continued Russian aggression 
2. Investing in the economy and infrastructure of Ukraine's future, rather than its past 
3. Preparing Ukraine for rapid and mutually beneficial integration into the European Union (EU) 
4. Hardening Ukraine's state, economy, and infrastructure, and deterring future Russian attacks

These tasks should be addressed in three phases, involving a sequential logic and beginning now. These are, with their attendant objectives: 
1. Wartime Resilience 
a. Minimize destruction 
b. Maintain core state functions 
c. Limit refugee displacement 
d. Plan for postwar rebuilding