2023 in review

A year in review, and the one ahead: what the second full year settled

The second full year of the war was the one in which the temporary arrangements became permanent ones. Reviewing it is mostly an exercise in noticing which improvisations…

Economy & Macro

Christmas 2023

The first Christmas on the December date. A calendar moved after four centuries, and households worked out for themselves what to do with the change.

National Days & Anniversaries

The decision to open negotiations

On 14 December 2023 the European Council decided to open accession negotiations with Ukraine. Eighteen months earlier the country had been granted candidate status with seven conditions attached…

Foreign relations

Modernism in Ukraine, hung in Madrid

An exhibition of early twentieth-century Ukrainian art opened in Spain at the end of 2023. The works were rescued, and the argument they make is one most visitors…

Culture and identity

St Nicholas Day, 6 December 2023

A greeting on the first December date, and a note on the year the day moved.

National Days & Anniversaries

Teaching children what not to touch

Children are disproportionately the victims of explosive remnants, for reasons that are entirely predictable and therefore addressable.

Domestic balance

Keeping ordinary medicine going

War does not suspend cancer, diabetes or childhood immunisation. Maintaining routine healthcare has been a quieter and larger task than trauma care.

Humanitarian dimension

Holodomor Remembrance Day 2023

Ninety years, and a candle in the window. The shortest of these messages, deliberately.

National Days & Anniversaries

The second winter, prepared for in advance

The winter of 2022 was survived by improvisation. The winter of 2023 was prepared for, and the difference between those two words is most of the story.

Domestic balance

Paying the salaries: budget support in late 2023

The least discussed form of assistance to Ukraine is also the largest in effect: money that pays teachers, doctors and pensions so the state can spend its own…

War economy

Repairing a roof before December

Humanitarian assistance in the third winter of the war concentrated on something specific and unglamorous: making damaged buildings weatherproof before the frost, because a repaired roof is cheaper…

Humanitarian dimension

The twelfth package and the diamond question

By late 2023 the European Union was preparing a further package, and the arguments inside it revealed exactly where the political limits sat.

Foreign relations

Turkey and Ukraine: a trade relationship in detail

Two Black Sea economies that trade heavily with each other in a small number of categories. The composition explains both the opportunity and the friction.

Trade & Investment

Measuring what was lost, and teaching it again

Four years of pandemic and war schooling produced a measurable gap in what children know. By 2023 the response had moved from keeping schools open to catching pupils…

Culture and identity

Ukrainian Language Day, 9 November 2023

A greeting for the day, marked in a year when a great many people made a deliberate choice about which language to use.

National Days & Anniversaries

Mykolaiv and the water supply problem

A city of several hundred thousand people lost its drinking water source and had to be supplied while a permanent replacement was engineered. The sequence is instructive.

Reconstruction & Recovery

The icon: technique, canon and the Ukrainian variant

An icon is made to a procedure that has barely changed in eight hundred years, and the Ukrainian schools took liberties with it that are worth noticing.

Folklore & Esoterica

Metering, billing and the commercial basis of a utility

Everything in an energy market rests on knowing who consumed what. Where metering is poor, no tariff reform, no market and no efficiency programme can work.

Energy & Infrastructure

When the calendar moved

Ukraine moved Christmas from 7 January to 25 December. What happens to a set of customs when the date they attach to changes is a genuinely interesting question.

Folklore & Esoterica

The export sectors nobody predicted

The trade agreement was discussed in terms of grain and steel. What actually grew fastest was furniture, cable assemblies and processed food.

Trade & Investment

Rebuilding a suburb that people still live in

The towns north-west of Kyiv were damaged and then, unusually, repopulated quickly. Rebuilding around residents is a different problem from rebuilding an empty place.

Reconstruction & Recovery

Compensation for a destroyed home, paid through an app

A compensation scheme for damaged and destroyed housing is normally a decade of paperwork. Ukraine built one that a person applies to from a phone, and the speed…

War economy

Tariff rate quotas and the honey deadline problem

A tariff quota that fills in three days is not a safeguard. Understanding how quotas are allocated explains why some Ukrainian exporters plan their year around a calendar…

Agriculture & Food

Kyivan baroque and its symbolic world

For a century and a half, educated Kyiv thought in emblems: images paired with mottoes and verses, read as a system. It produced a visual language that is…

Folklore & Esoterica

Ukraine Market Report — Q3 2023

The corridor arrangement lapsed in July and Ukraine established a unilateral route along its western Black Sea coast. Within months it was carrying more than the arrangement it…

Quarterly & Annual Reports

The philosophy of the heart

A recognisable line of Ukrainian thought holds that the seat of a person is not the intellect, and it runs from an eighteenth-century wandering teacher through to the…

Folklore & Esoterica

Crop insurance and the risk nobody wanted to price

Agricultural insurance in Ukraine has existed for years and covers a small fraction of the planted area. The reason is a data problem more than a demand problem.

Agriculture & Food

Preparing for a winter before it arrives

The winter of 2022 was survived by improvisation. The winter of 2023 was prepared for: equipment stockpiled, substations physically protected, and repair crews rehearsed against scenarios rather than…

Domestic balance

Keeping procurement open when secrecy is tempting

Some wartime purchases genuinely cannot be published. Deciding which ones, and keeping the boundary narrow, is the whole of the problem.

Politics & Governance

The folk song archive

A very large body of song was collected, written down and later recorded, mostly in the last hundred and fifty years, and mostly just in time.

Folklore & Esoterica

Housing first, and the problem of proving what you lost

The largest single category of damage in Ukraine is housing. Rebuilding it turned out to depend less on construction capacity than on paperwork.

War economy

The first September back in classrooms

In September 2023 a substantial number of Ukrainian schools reopened for in-person teaching. What made it possible was concrete, in the literal sense.

Culture and identity

Reading a reconstruction market before it opens: pricing, capacity and the first-mover question

Reconstruction markets have a characteristic shape that is visible in advance. Understanding how capacity constraints translate into pricing, and when being early is an advantage rather than a…

Reconstruction & Recovery

Mental health, treated as public health

A country where almost everyone has been displaced, bereaved, bombed or waiting for news needs mental health provision on a scale no health system was built for. Ukraine…

Humanitarian dimension

Ukrainian music abroad

Music travels further and faster than any other cultural product, and Ukrainian artists have used that in a period when other channels were harder.

Society & Regions

Water supply after Kakhovka

The loss of a reservoir removed the water source for cities, farms and a nuclear plant's cooling. The response was immediate engineering; the reconstruction question is much longer.

Energy & Infrastructure

Turning demining into an industry

By 2023 clearance had outgrown the model of a few accredited operators. Ukraine opened the sector to certified commercial companies, created a national authority, and started building a…

Domestic balance

When the water goes

The destruction of a dam in June 2023 created a humanitarian problem that most responses are not designed for: not shortage of food, but shortage of water.

Humanitarian dimension

Knowledge Day, 1 September 2023

A school year that begins in several different formats at once.

National Days & Anniversaries

Vetting the judges

Ukraine has repeatedly tried to assess the integrity of its own judges. The mechanism that finally produced results has a specific and instructive design.

Politics & Governance

Grain from Ukraine as humanitarian supply

Some Ukrainian grain has left not as a commercial cargo but as a humanitarian one, purchased by donors and shipped to countries in food crisis.

Agriculture & Food

The Fund programme as an external audit

An International Monetary Fund programme is usually discussed as money. Its more valuable function during this period was quarterly verification that other lenders could rely on.

War economy

Independence Day 2023: a corridor of its own

Thirty-two years. Five weeks after the grain initiative lapsed, Ukraine has opened a unilateral shipping route along its western coast — and the economy is growing again for…

National Days & Anniversaries

The sanctions argument moved from adding to enforcing

By the third quarter of 2023 the interesting question was no longer what to prohibit. It was why prohibited goods were still arriving.

Foreign relations

Anti-corruption enforcement comes of age

Ukraine built a set of anti-corruption institutions over a decade. The interesting question is not whether they exist but whether they produce outcomes, and by now they do.

Politics & Governance

Culture as an industry

Publishing, film, music and design employ people, generate revenue and export. Treated as an industry rather than as a subsidised good, the sector looks different.

Society & Regions

Ukrainian art on tour, and what an exhibition does

Evacuating a collection protects it. Exhibiting it abroad does something else: it puts Ukrainian art into the permanent record of European museums, in front of audiences who had…

Culture and identity

The corridor Ukraine opened on its own terms

When the grain arrangement lapsed in July 2023, the expectation was that Ukrainian seaborne exports would stop. Instead Ukraine declared its own corridor, hugging the western coast, and…

Foreign relations

The seven steps, and the reform machine they started

Candidate status came with a list. Whatever one thinks of external conditionality, the list produced more legislative movement in a year than the preceding several.

Politics & Governance

Language in daily life

What people actually speak here has changed, and the practical implications for a business are simpler than the discussion around the subject suggests.

Society & Regions

The Euro-Atlantic dimension, described factually

Set out as a description of instruments and programmes rather than as a political argument, because the instruments are what actually operate.

EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration

Sanctions compliance for a company trading here

A company trading in this region needs a screening process, and it is neither expensive nor complicated. Not having one is the risk.

Trade & Investment

Protecting a house

Building a house was accompanied by a set of practices concerning where it stood, what went under the first course and who crossed the threshold first.

Folklore & Esoterica

What convergence is worth to a company

Adopting somebody else's rules sounds like a concession. For an exporting firm it is a cost reduction, and the saving can be calculated.

EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration

The corridor Ukraine ran itself

When the negotiated arrangement lapsed, Ukraine established an export route on its own terms. That it worked commercially is the remarkable part.

Agriculture & Food

Autonomous trade measures and the tariff-free years

For a period, Ukrainian goods entered the European market with no tariffs and no quotas at all. The effect on volumes was immediate and the transition back is…

Trade & Investment

European gauge and the border bottleneck

Two railway systems built to different widths meet at the western border. Everything crossing has to be lifted, tipped or have its wheels changed.

Energy & Infrastructure

What convergence costs a company

European alignment is discussed as a national project. For an individual firm it is a specific bill, and knowing the size of it before it arrives is worth…

EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration

Charitable giving and where it goes

Domestic philanthropy here operates at a scale and speed that would be remarkable anywhere, and it runs largely on payment apps and personal reputation.

Society & Regions

The corridor Ukraine opened on its own terms

When the negotiated grain arrangement ended, Ukraine established its own Black Sea shipping corridor without an agreement. It worked, and the reasons are instructive.

Trade & Investment

Day of Ukrainian Statehood, 15 July 2023

A greeting for a young holiday about an old subject, kept to what can safely be said by a guest.

National Days & Anniversaries

Ukraine Market Report — Q2 2023

Growth continuing from a low base, inflation falling rapidly, and an export corridor whose continuation was uncertain from one renewal to the next.

Quarterly & Annual Reports

The Danube ports that carried a country

Izmail and Reni had handled modest volumes for decades. Within months they were moving a large share of a national export trade.

Energy & Infrastructure

Ivana Kupala, 7 July 2023

A midsummer night marked more quietly than usual.

National Days & Anniversaries

The economy that kept working

After a severe contraction in 2022, the Ukrainian economy returned to growth while the war continued. The composition of that growth is more interesting than the rate.

Economy & Macro

Export credit and the agencies that carry the risk

An exporter cannot offer a Ukrainian buyer two-year payment terms out of their own balance sheet. An export credit agency is what makes that offer possible.

Trade & Investment

Constitution Day 2023

A short greeting, kept short as always, in a year when the legal framework was being rewritten at speed for a different reason.

National Days & Anniversaries

The instrument aimed at the detour

The eleventh package in June 2023 was less about new prohibitions than about a new capability: the power to restrict exports to a third country whose territory is…

Foreign relations

London: the conference that talked to investors, not only donors

The recovery conference in London in June 2023 did something the earlier ones had not. It addressed private capital directly, and it spent most of its time on…

War economy

Reform assessed in public, twice a year

By mid-2023 Ukraine had entered a rhythm that most candidate countries find uncomfortable: a published external assessment of what has and has not been done.

Foreign relations

Fifty billion, tied to a plan

In June 2023 the European Commission proposed a single instrument to carry support for four years — grants, loans and investment guarantees together, released against a reform and…

War economy

Aligning the customs code

Customs alignment is invisible until you stand at a border and count the hours. It is one of the most practically consequential chapters there is.

EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration

Women in the Ukrainian workforce

Ukraine has high female labour force participation, high female educational attainment, and a persistent pay gap. All three facts have the same set of causes.

Society & Regions

Coordinating dozens of donors without chaos

The failure mode of large reconstruction efforts is not lack of money. It is forty donors funding the same visible project while nobody funds the sewer.

Reconstruction & Recovery

Reserves, and the return of a buffer

Foreign exchange reserves are an abstraction until you are importing on credit terms, at which point they are the reason your supplier extends them.

Economy & Macro

Finishing a school year that nobody attended normally

In June 2023 a cohort finished secondary school having spent most of it online, and sat an admissions examination redesigned for a country under attack.

Culture and identity

Ukrainian icons on the walls of the Louvre

In the middle of 2023 a handful of Byzantine icons from a damaged Kyiv museum went on show in Paris. Protecting them and showing them turned out to…

Culture and identity

Clearing land is the slowest work there is

Ukraine became one of the most heavily mined countries in the world, and the second quarter of 2023 made the problem harder in a way nobody had planned…

Domestic balance

Kakhovka: water, and everything that depends on it

The destruction of the Kakhovka dam in June 2023 was a flood emergency for a few days and a water supply emergency for years. The response had to…

Humanitarian dimension

What the engineers did with the first quiet summer

After surviving one winter of attacks on the grid, Ukrainian power engineers had a few warm months to make the second winter less dangerous. They used them well.

Domestic balance

Vyshyvanka Day 2023

The third Thursday of May, and a shirt that has become one of the most widely recognised garments in Europe.

National Days & Anniversaries

Kharkiv: universities, engineering and resilience

Kharkiv is a university and engineering city that happens to be forty kilometres from a border. Both halves of that sentence explain what has happened to it.

Society & Regions

Opening accession negotiations

The decision to open negotiations is a political act with a technical consequence: it starts a process that runs on documents rather than declarations.

EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration

Easter, 16 April 2023

An Easter greeting for a second spring under difficult conditions.

National Days & Anniversaries

Rehabilitation centres built to a standard that did not exist here before

By 2023 the rehabilitation and prosthetics capacity being built in Ukraine had moved past improvisation. New centres opened designed around a model — surgery, prosthetics, physiotherapy and psychological…

Humanitarian dimension

Ukraine Market Report — Q1 2023

The economy stabilised at a much lower level and began growing again from a very low base. A four-year external programme was agreed in March, the first of…

Quarterly & Annual Reports

Rebuilding a grid while it is being hit

The electricity system stayed up through repeated damage. That was not luck; it was a small number of engineering decisions and a very large number of repair crews.

Energy & Infrastructure

Nuclear safety oversight under extraordinary conditions

Nuclear plants require continuous power, water, staff and independent inspection. Maintaining all four in wartime is an unprecedented problem, and it was addressed procedurally.

Energy & Infrastructure

A four-year programme, in the middle of a war

In March 2023 the International Monetary Fund approved a multi-year programme for Ukraine. The Fund had never before agreed a full programme with a country in a full-scale…

War economy

Seven recommendations, and the machine they started

Candidate status came with a list of things to do. The list turned out to be more useful than the status.

Foreign relations

Someone finally counted

In March 2023 a joint assessment by the World Bank, the European Commission, the United Nations and the Ukrainian government put a number on what recovery would cost…

War economy

Compensation that arrives in an app

Ukraine built a housing compensation system that a citizen operates from a phone. The design decisions behind it are worth studying anywhere.

Reconstruction & Recovery

A year of school taught through a screen

By early 2023 Ukrainian schooling had completed a full year of teaching under attack, and the sector had learned things worth writing down.

Culture and identity

The winter the grid was supposed to fail, and did not

Through the winter of 2022 and 2023 the Ukrainian energy system was hit repeatedly and was widely expected to collapse. It did not. Understanding why is a lesson…

Domestic balance

The first surveys, and the size of the problem

Before land can be cleared it has to be surveyed, and in early 2023 the surveying was still establishing how large the task would be.

Domestic balance

International Women's Day 2023

A greeting, brief, in a year when the day was marked quietly in most places.

National Days & Anniversaries

Housing: the largest single line

Housing is the biggest item in any damage assessment and the hardest to deliver, because unlike a bridge every unit belongs to somebody with their own circumstances and…

Reconstruction & Recovery

A hospital needs power before it needs anything else

In the first months of 2023 the most valuable medical donation to Ukraine was not medicine. It was generators, fuel and the equipment to keep a hospital running…

Humanitarian dimension

From new restrictions to closing the old ones

By 2023 the sanctions effort had changed character. The tenth package added measures, but the real work had moved to enforcement: circumvention, third countries, and the components that…

Foreign relations

The first year of full-scale war: an economic assessment

Output down by roughly a third, half the budget funded from abroad, the energy system under sustained attack, and an economy that nonetheless kept functioning. What held, what…

Economy & Macro

Displacement, and the communities that absorbed it

Millions of people moved within Ukraine, and most of them were housed by ordinary communities rather than by camps. That outcome was not inevitable and is worth understanding.

Society & Regions

Supporting the towns that took people in

A town of thirty thousand that receives eight thousand displaced people has a water system, a school and a clinic sized for thirty thousand. Supporting the arrivals without…

Humanitarian dimension

Who decides what gets rebuilt first

Three sets of priorities meet in one room: national plans, community proposals and donor preferences. How that meeting is structured determines what gets built.

Reconstruction & Recovery

Odesa enters the World Heritage list, in danger

On 25 January 2023 UNESCO inscribed the historic centre of Odesa on the World Heritage List and simultaneously on the List of World Heritage in Danger. Both decisions…

Culture and identity

Ukraine Annual Review 2022: what an economy does when everything is tested at once

The deepest contraction in the country's history, and a financial system, a workforce and an export sector that each found a way to keep functioning. The year is…

Quarterly & Annual Reports

DREAM: a public pipeline for reconstruction projects

Reconstruction money attracts scrutiny, and it should. DREAM is the answer Ukraine built: a single public register where every project is visible from concept through tender to completion.

Reconstruction & Recovery

Day of Unity, 22 January 2023

A greeting for a unity day when the chain could not be formed in the usual way.

National Days & Anniversaries

Ukraine Market Report — Q4 2022

Sustained pressure on the electricity system through the winter produced the fastest adoption of distributed generation the country has seen, and turned a temporary response into permanent infrastructure.

Quarterly & Annual Reports

Counting the damage properly

Every reconstruction discussion begins with a total. What determines whether that number means anything is the methodology behind it, which almost nobody reads.

Reconstruction & Recovery

Christmas, 7 January 2023

A Christmas greeting for a January when households were marking it on two different dates for the first time.

National Days & Anniversaries

New Year, 1 January 2023

A new year greeting written in a winter of blackouts, from a city that celebrated anyway and quietly.

National Days & Anniversaries