2024 in review
Analysis published during 2024.
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Christmas 2024
The second Christmas on the December date, by which point the argument in most families had settled one way or the other.
National Days & Anniversaries -
The annual report card
Each autumn the European Commission publishes a detailed assessment of every candidate country. Reading Ukraine's carefully is more informative than most commentary.
Foreign relations -
Who will actually build it
Reconstruction plans assume a construction sector capable of executing them. Ukraine's has lost a large share of its workforce, and that is the binding constraint.
War economy -
Lending against the profits, not the assets
Immobilised russian sovereign assets generate income. In 2024 the G7 agreed a structure that lends Ukraine a large sum now and repays it from that income over years…
War economy -
The trades a reconstruction needs
Ukraine will need tens of thousands of electricians, welders and machine operators. Vocational education is where those come from, and it was the weakest part of the system.
Culture and identity -
St Nicholas Day, 6 December 2024
A greeting on the December date, and a note on the children whose pillow this year is in a shelter, a rented room or another country.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Documentation is a form of defence
By the end of 2024 the most consequential cultural work was not exhibition but documentation: recording damage, in a form that would stand up in a legal proceeding.
Culture and identity -
Blood, and the system that moves it
A transfusion service is a logistics operation with a very short shelf life. Ukraine reformed and expanded one under the worst possible conditions.
Humanitarian dimension -
A third winter response, and what it had learned
By the winter of 2024 the humanitarian response had a settled doctrine: repair before relief, cash before goods, and reach the small places first.
Humanitarian dimension -
A third winter, planned rather than survived
By the winter of 2024 the energy response had a settled architecture: imports across the European interconnection, distributed generation at critical loads, protected substations and a stock of…
Domestic balance -
Protecting the intangible
You cannot put a wedding song cycle in a display case. Safeguarding a living practice requires a different method from conserving an object, and the method is now…
Folklore & Esoterica -
Holodomor Remembrance Day, 23 November 2024
A remembrance message, and a note on what the recognitions of recent years actually change.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Compliance is where sanctions actually happen
A sanctions regime is enforced less by governments than by the compliance departments of thousands of companies, and that is where the real work sits.
Foreign relations -
What holds a society together under strain
Under sustained pressure, formal institutions matter less than most theories predict and informal networks matter considerably more.
Society & Regions -
Ornament on buildings
Vernacular building here carried decoration in three materials, and each was applied by a different trade with a different rhythm of work.
Folklore & Esoterica -
Land handed back, hectare by hectare
By late 2024 the demining sector was producing what any industry produces: measurable output. Hundreds of thousands of hectares surveyed, a growing share released, and a documented record…
Domestic balance -
The trade that did not stop: what kept moving and why it matters
Attention focused on what was lost. The more informative question is what continued without interruption, because that tells you which commercial relationships are genuinely robust and which only…
Trade & Investment -
Ukrainian Language Day, 9 November 2024
A message on language day from someone who learned the language late and badly, and is glad he did.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Industrial capacity and the defence supply chain
Written as an industrial subject: a manufacturing base grew very quickly, and what it installed — machining, electronics assembly, quality systems — is general capability.
Trade & Investment -
Who works the land now
Mechanisation removed most agricultural jobs before anyone left the villages. The labour question now is about skills, not numbers.
Agriculture & Food -
What young Ukrainians expect
A generation that has spent its formative years in disruption has a specific relationship to institutions, work and the future. It is not the one older commentary assumes.
Society & Regions -
Cement, aggregate and the materials for rebuilding
Reconstruction consumes materials at a scale that no supply chain currently serves. Where they will come from is a genuine investment question.
Energy & Infrastructure -
Statistics that Eurostat accepts
Comparable data is not a technicality. It is the precondition for allocating funds, measuring compliance and arguing about anything at all.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Kharkiv: rebuilding a large industrial city
A city of over a million people, close to the border, that has stayed occupied by its own inhabitants throughout. The engineering response has been unusual.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Meeting European food standards
A producer wanting to sell food into the European market follows a defined path. It is long, it is documented, and it is the same for everyone.
Agriculture & Food -
Ukrainian SMEs learning to export
A small manufacturer with a good product and no export experience faces a specific and solvable list of obstacles, and support programmes exist for exactly that list.
Trade & Investment -
The transformer supply chain
A large power transformer is a bespoke object with a lead time measured in years. That single fact shaped the whole energy response.
Energy & Infrastructure -
Ukraine Market Report — Q3 2024
A harvest exported normally through a corridor now operating at scale, and a labour market where the constraint had become absolute rather than merely tight.
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
The pilot reconstructions worth studying
Some communities rebuilt early, quickly and well. What they had in common is not funding, and identifying it is more useful than admiring the result.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Designing an energy system that cannot be switched off
Energy security is often discussed as a supply relationship. It is better understood as a set of design principles, and they can be stated plainly.
Energy & Infrastructure -
You cannot rebuild what you cannot title
Before a single house is rebuilt, someone has to be able to prove who owned it. That is a registry problem, and it decides how fast reconstruction can…
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Returning farmland to production
Clearing agricultural land is the demining task with the clearest return: a cleared hectare produces a crop every year afterwards.
Agriculture & Food -
Recovery planning at community level
National recovery plans allocate money. Community recovery plans decide what actually gets built, and most communities have to learn how to write one.
Politics & Governance -
Policy for veterans, as an economic question
A very large number of people will return from service and need to work. Treating that as a welfare problem rather than a labour market one gets it…
Politics & Governance -
Screening: the least dramatic and most consequential stage
Accession negotiations formally opened in mid-2024, and the work that immediately followed was the least reported and the most decisive.
Foreign relations -
City to city
Some of the most effective reconstruction assistance has gone directly from one municipality to another, bypassing national machinery entirely.
War economy -
Getting the books translated
A literature that is not translated does not exist for most of the world. By 2024 translation had become one of the more effective forms of cultural support.
Culture and identity -
Auditing public money in wartime
Emergency spending is exactly the spending most in need of audit and least convenient to audit. Ukraine has kept the mechanism running, which is not the obvious outcome.
Politics & Governance -
Machines, dogs and the limits of both
Clearance is often pictured as a person with a detector. In practice it is a sequence of methods, each faster and less certain than the next.
Domestic balance -
Rebuilding a hospital to a different standard
A destroyed hospital is not rebuilt as it was. It is rebuilt to a standard the old one never met, and the decision to do that is not…
Humanitarian dimension -
Evacuating people who do not want to leave
The hardest humanitarian work in Ukraine is persuading an eighty-year-old to leave a house they have lived in for sixty years, and doing it without coercion.
Humanitarian dimension -
Schools built underground
In regions where an air raid alert can last most of a school day, the answer was not a basement adapted as a shelter. It was a school…
Culture and identity -
Knowledge Day, 1 September 2024
A first-of-September greeting for a yard that is fuller than last year, and for the yards that still cannot fill.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Rebuilding generation in the months you have
The strikes of spring 2024 took out a large share of Ukraine's thermal generation. The summer was spent doing something about it before October.
Domestic balance -
The publishing boom
Ukrainian-language publishing has grown from a marginal business to a functioning industry with festivals, prizes, translation programmes and readers who buy hardbacks.
Society & Regions -
What the 2004 and 2007 enlargements teach
Ten countries joined in one year and two more three years later. What happened to their economies afterwards is the best available evidence about what accession does.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Political risk insurance and the return of investors
An investor does not need the risk to disappear. They need it transferred to someone who will price it, and that is what these institutions do.
Trade & Investment -
Borrowing against a future that is not yet certain
In 2024 partner governments agreed to lend Ukraine substantial sums to be repaid from the future revenues of immobilised russian assets. The structure is unusual and worth understanding.
War economy -
Independence Day 2024: accession negotiations, and a grid under attack
Thirty-three years. In June, Ukraine formally opened membership negotiations with the European Union. Through the summer, roughly half its generating capacity has been damaged. Both facts will define…
National Days & Anniversaries -
How reconstruction contracts are awarded
A practical description of the procurement systems a contractor will meet, and what determines whether a foreign firm can actually bid.
Trade & Investment -
Defence industrial cooperation as industrial policy
Joint production arrangements bring machine tools, quality systems and engineering skills into a country. Those outlast whatever is being produced.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
A banking system that made money in wartime
Ukrainian banks have been profitable through the war. That fact is counterintuitive, entirely explicable, and raises a legitimate policy question.
Economy & Macro -
War risk insurance and the price of moving goods
Cargo does not move without cover. Rebuilding war risk insurance for the Black Sea was a financial engineering problem and it determined how much grain got sold.
Economy & Macro -
The labour market got tight, and wages moved
For most of the last two decades Ukraine had more workers than jobs. That reversed, and the consequences run through the whole economy.
Economy & Macro -
Keeping reconstruction procurement clean
Very large sums spent quickly through construction contracts is the classic setting for procurement failure. The safeguards are known and they have to be built in advance.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Building the institutions accession requires
Membership is not a legal state; it is a set of working institutions. Several of the ones Ukraine will need do not yet exist in the required form.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Day of Ukrainian Statehood 2024
The third observance of a young holiday about an old subject, and a note on what statehood means to somebody who deals with the state daily.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Ukraine Market Report — Q2 2024
Sustained strikes on generating capacity through the spring produced the most severe electricity constraint of the war, and accession negotiations formally opened in June.
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
The Ukraine Facility and reform-linked money
A multi-year financing instrument tied to a plan with indicators. The structure is as important as the amount, because it changes how money and reform relate.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Ivana Kupala, 7 July 2024
A midsummer greeting for a third wartime Kupala, kept small and inland.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Mental health as public policy
Ukraine is building a mental health system rather than a set of services, and the distinction is what makes it likely to last.
Society & Regions -
Accession negotiations open: how to read the screening reports
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 useful business…
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Constitution Day, 28 June 2024
A short note on the anniversary, with an observation about what the document has been doing lately.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Negotiations formally opened
On 25 June 2024 the first intergovernmental conference between the European Union and Ukraine was held in Luxembourg. Negotiations were formally open, and the screening of Ukrainian law…
Foreign relations -
The shadow fleet, and the ships nobody would insure
A price cap enforced through Western insurance can be answered by buying old tankers and insuring them elsewhere. By 2024 the response was to designate the vessels themselves…
Foreign relations -
The Ukraine Facility and predictable money
What multi-year financing gives that emergency aid cannot is not more money. It is a number a ministry can put in a four-year plan.
Economy & Macro -
A society with many veterans
A large share of families will have someone who served. That changes workplaces, schools, medicine and ordinary social life, and most of the adjustment is practical.
Society & Regions -
Hydrogen: the honest version
Hydrogen attracts more memoranda than molecules. It is worth separating what is technically plausible from what has so far only been announced.
Energy & Infrastructure -
Reconstruction readiness: what preparation actually means for a company
A great deal has been said about the scale of Ukraine's reconstruction and very little about what a company should be doing now if it intends to participate…
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Getting private money into the room
Public money cannot rebuild Ukraine. Everyone involved knows this, and by 2024 the question had become what specifically would bring private capital in.
War economy -
Biomethane and agricultural residue
A country that grows an enormous amount of crop also produces an enormous amount of straw, husk and manure. Europe wants the gas that can be made from…
Energy & Infrastructure -
Underground schools and what they say about planning
In 2024 Ukrainian cities began building schools designed to operate below ground. That is a strange sentence, and the reasoning behind it is sound.
Culture and identity -
The same collection, now in London
By mid-2024 the touring Ukrainian modernism exhibition had reached a major London institution. What began as an evacuation had become a circuit.
Culture and identity -
Finding contamination from the air
The slowest part of demining is deciding where to look. Aerial imagery and pattern analysis are changing that, and the gains are larger than they sound.
Domestic balance -
The international financial institutions as builders
Development banks are usually described as sources of money. From a contractor's point of view they are sources of rules, and the rules are why the projects work.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Vocational training and the skills a rebuild needs
The reconstruction will be carried out by welders, machine operators and electricians. There are not enough of them, and the training system is the thing that fixes that.
Society & Regions -
The care that does not show on a scan
By 2024 the largest untreated health need in Ukraine was psychological, and building a service for it from a system that never had one is a specific kind…
Humanitarian dimension -
Humanitarian work in its third year, and what changed in it
By mid-2024 humanitarian assistance to Ukraine had stopped looking like an emergency response and started looking like a system. That shift is worth describing.
Humanitarian dimension -
Insuring reconstruction risk
No amount of investor enthusiasm produces a project without insurance. War risk cover is therefore the actual gate through which reconstruction passes.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Making frozen assets do some work
In 2024 European governments agreed to direct the extraordinary revenues generated by immobilised russian central bank assets towards Ukraine. The legal reasoning is worth understanding.
War economy -
The category that had been left alone
By 2024 European sanctions reached liquefied natural gas for the first time, and the way it was done shows how these decisions are actually made.
Foreign relations -
Competition policy and state aid
A single market only works if the same rules on subsidy and market power apply everywhere. That discipline is one of the harder parts of accession.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Vyshyvanka Day, 16 May 2024
A greeting for the day, and a note on the shirts being made now by people who learned during the war.
National Days & Anniversaries -
When the strikes moved from the wires to the turbines
The attacks of 2022 targeted substations, which can be repaired in days. The attacks of spring 2024 targeted generating plant, which cannot. The response had to be structural…
Domestic balance -
Easter 2024
The fifth of May, and a greeting from the twentieth Easter I have marked in this country.
National Days & Anniversaries -
The fundamentals cluster
Rule of law, public administration, procurement and statistics. This group of chapters opens first, closes last, and determines the pace of everything else.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Designing for people who came back injured
Accessibility has moved from a compliance box to a mainstream design requirement, because a large number of people now need it and they are visible.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Build back better, in practice not in slogans
The phrase is used so often it has stopped meaning anything. It has a precise meaning, and it is written into building codes rather than speeches.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Screening: comparing two legal systems chapter by chapter
Before anything is negotiated, both sides sit down and go through the entire body of law together. It is tedious and it sets the real agenda.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Rebuilding energy infrastructure to a better standard
The temptation after damage is to restore exactly what was there. In energy that would mean rebuilding the concentration that made the system vulnerable.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
The turn to distributed generation
A system built around a few very large power stations is efficient and concentrated. Ukraine has been rebuilding towards the opposite topology.
Energy & Infrastructure -
Ukraine Market Report — Q1 2024
A multi-year EU financing facility agreed in February gave the civilian budget a horizon it had not had since 2022, and the maritime corridor carried volumes approaching pre-war…
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
What to do with the rubble
Demolition waste is either an enormous disposal cost or a free supply of road aggregate. Which one it becomes is decided by regulation, not by engineering.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Demining as an economic programme
Demining is filed under humanitarian assistance. It is more accurately understood as the highest-return infrastructure investment available in Ukraine, and the one that has to come first.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Rebuilding schools and hospitals
A school is not a building with desks in it. Rebuilding one means deciding what a school has to be able to do in the conditions that now…
Reconstruction & Recovery -
From decision to framework
The European Council decided in December 2023 to open accession talks. The first quarter of 2024 was spent turning that decision into a document that says what the…
Foreign relations -
A four-year instrument instead of an annual argument
In early 2024 the European Union adopted a multi-year financing instrument for Ukraine. Its most valuable feature is its duration.
War economy -
The shelter is the school building
By early 2024 whether a Ukrainian child sat in a classroom depended on one thing: whether the school had somewhere safe to go when the siren sounded.
Culture and identity -
The Ukraine Facility: what changes when financing gets a calendar
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 Ukrainian ministry…
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Teaching the hands that will do the restoration
Restoring a damaged historic building requires skills that a country loses quietly when it stops needing them. Rebuilding that workforce is slower than rebuilding the buildings and has…
Culture and identity -
International Women's Day 2024
A greeting in a period when the composition of the workforce has changed more than at any point I have witnessed here.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Turning demining into an industry
By early 2024 Ukraine had done something few mine-affected countries manage: it built a certification and market structure so that clearance could scale beyond what donors alone could…
Domestic balance -
Medical evacuation as a European system
One of the most effective arrangements of this war has almost no public profile: a mechanism that moves patients from Ukrainian hospitals into beds across Europe.
Humanitarian dimension -
The winter that went better than expected
The winter of 2023 to 2024 passed with far fewer outages than the one before it. Understanding why is more useful than being relieved about it.
Domestic balance -
The construction workforce question
A detailed look at who is available to build, what they can do, and the specific measures that would enlarge the pool.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Two years of packages, and what the list looks like now
The thirteenth package arrived on the second anniversary. Reading the sanctions record after two years tells you more about how coalitions hold than any single measure does.
Foreign relations -
Evacuation as a standing operation
By 2024 evacuation from settlements near the front had become a routine, organised process rather than an emergency — transport, reception, documents, accommodation, and the difficult work of…
Humanitarian dimension -
Does Ukraine have the capacity to rebuild itself
Reconstruction discussions concentrate on money. The binding constraint is more likely to be physical: contractors, plant, materials and people. It is worth assessing that honestly.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Energy as a strategic variable: generation, storage, transit and interconnection
Ukraine's energy position has flipped completely in fifteen years — from a transit state dependent on one supplier to a European grid participant with the continent's largest gas…
Energy & Infrastructure -
The people who came back
Return migration is less discussed than departure and is at least as consequential, because people come back with things they did not leave with.
Society & Regions -
Phase two, and legal entities
The second stage of the land market opened purchase to Ukrainian companies. It came with caps, and the caps are the interesting part.
Agriculture & Food -
The Facility is adopted
In February 2024 the European Union adopted the Ukraine Facility: fifty billion euro over four years, in grants, loans and guarantees, released against a plan Ukraine had written…
War economy -
Ukraine Annual Review 2023: the year improvisation became structure
Growth returned from a collapsed base, inflation fell to single digits, a unilateral sea corridor replaced a negotiated one, and accession negotiations were opened. The temporary arrangements of…
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
Day of Unity 2024
Twenty years since I arrived, and a January day about lands held together.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Ukraine Market Report — Q4 2023
A decision to open accession negotiations in December converted EU membership from a direction of travel into a technical work programme with chapters, benchmarks and a schedule.
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
New Year, 1 January 2024
A New Year greeting for a table with some empty places and the meal made anyway.
National Days & Anniversaries
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