Covering Ukraine since 2004
This is a working archive. Since 2004 it has followed the same country through five presidencies, two revolutions, a currency that lost most of its value twice, an association agreement with the European Union and a full-scale war — and it keeps asking the same question each time: what does this actually change for people doing business here?
Start here Open the 2004–2026 timeline Browse the full archive
After twenty years of answering the same questions, this is the list. Nine items, in the order they should be done, with the reasoning for each — and the three things that most often go wrong.
Large thermal units take years to replace. What has actually been built since 2023 is gas piston plant, cogeneration, batteries and rooftop solar — a different…
The first intergovernmental conference was held on 25 June. What follows is a technical screening of thirty-five chapters — and the resulting reports are the most…
Fifty billion euros over four years, disbursed against a reform plan with quarterly indicators. The amount matters. The predictability matters more, and it changes what a…
It had no industrial policy, no state investment and almost no domestic clients. It grew through a currency collapse, a war and a pandemic, and it…
If this is your first visit, let me do the ordering. These ten pieces set the frame: what the country produces, where it came from, and…
The question I am asked most often is where to begin. My answer has never been a single piece; it has been this order. Form of…
The war section is kept quarter by quarter; this order is for reading it once, end to end. From the application to the financing, from the…
You cannot read a country from its numbers alone. After more than twenty years of living here, this is the layer I would want known before…
Every enlargement has taken longer than the candidate hoped and less time than the sceptics predicted. The variables that decide the length are known.
Money committed is not a measure of recovery. Nor is money spent. The useful indicators are physical and social, and they are harder to report.
A greeting for the day, on the ordinary business of being a state.
A midsummer night, and a custom that keeps its own date.
A greeting for Constitution Day, thirty years on from the text.
On the night of 6 to 7 July — or 23 to 24 June, depending on which calendar you keep — people jump over fires, float…
Ukraine's largest institutional investor is not a company. Understanding how a development bank underwrites, what it requires and what it de-risks is now a core commercial…
A greeting for the day, and a note on where the patterns come from.
Regional patterns are specific enough that a practised eye can place a shirt within about fifty kilometres. The motifs were protective before they were decorative, and…
The paska, the basket, the greeting exchanged in the same words as always. Twenty-two Easters here, and the form has not changed at all.
The name comes from the verb to write, not to paint. Wax is applied with a stylus, the egg is dyed, and the process repeats from…
A narrow embroidered length of linen appears at every threshold of a Ukrainian life — birth, marriage, burial — and at state ceremonies. It is not…
A continuous record of the Ukrainian market, quarter by quarter and year by year: output, currency, trade, sectors and what each period settled.
Growth, inflation, the hryvnia, budgets and the macro-financial programmes that keep Ukraine's economy running.
Foreign trade flows, free trade agreements, customs practice and the practical mechanics of entering the Ukrainian market.
Elections, governments, parliamentary arithmetic and the institutional reforms that shape the business environment.
Gas, electricity, transit, nuclear generation, ports and the transport corridors that connect Ukraine to its markets.
Damage assessment, recovery financing, construction capacity and the institutions being built to spend it well.
The Association Agreement, DCFTA, candidate status, accession negotiations and the regulatory convergence behind them.
Grain, oilseeds, the land market, export logistics and Ukraine's role in global food supply.
Demography, labour, migration, regional economies and the human context behind the numbers.
The ritual year, the symbols embroidered into cloth and painted onto eggs, the Carpathian practitioners and the philosophers — the older layer beneath modern Ukraine.
Independence Day and the other dates in Ukraine's calendar, each read against the state of the country in that year.
One email a month: what was written that month, and one older piece from the archive. I send nothing else.
The primary sources this archive rests on. All of them official bodies or institutional data providers.
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