2025 in review
Analysis published during 2025.
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Christmas, 25 December 2025
A Christmas greeting on the December date, in the year the change stopped being news.
National Days & Anniversaries -
What accession looks like from the inside of a ministry
By the end of 2025 the European path had become, for the people doing it, an enormous volume of technical work with very few visible milestones.
Foreign relations -
Bridges, track and the things that carry everything else
Transport infrastructure is the reconstruction that all other reconstruction depends on, and it has been rebuilt continuously rather than waiting for a plan.
War economy -
Why the old layer matters now
Traditional culture has become one of the ways people here state who they are. Treating that culturally rather than politically is both possible and more accurate.
Folklore & Esoterica -
The cohort that has never had a normal year
By the end of 2025 an entire school generation had passed through disruption from beginning to end. Planning for them is now a demographic question, not an emergency…
Culture and identity -
St Nicholas Day, 6 December 2025
A greeting for a morning that has now belonged to December for three years, and for the children who have known nothing else.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Orchestras, films and the argument they make without arguing
Ukrainian musicians and filmmakers have spent four years touring, and the effect of that work is different in kind from anything a spokesperson can achieve.
Culture and identity -
Who pays for infrastructure
A road, a water plant and a port berth are financed in entirely different ways, and choosing the wrong instrument is how good projects fail.
Energy & Infrastructure -
Entering the market now: what has changed
The entry checklist that worked five years ago is missing four items. Here is the revised version, written for the conditions that actually exist.
Trade & Investment -
How many people will live in Ukraine
Every plan for Ukraine assumes a population number, and most of them assume it without saying so. The honest range is wide and the consequences are large.
Society & Regions -
Investing in Ukrainian agriculture now
The sector has good soil, restored export routes and land that can now be owned. It also has risks that a serious investor prices rather than ignores.
Agriculture & Food -
The craft revival and its market
Traditional craft has a market again, which keeps it alive and simultaneously pulls it towards whatever sells. Both effects are real.
Folklore & Esoterica -
Italian industry and the recovery agenda
Italy hosted a recovery conference and has an industrial profile that maps unusually well onto what reconstruction actually needs.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Handing the programme to its owner
International mine action operations eventually leave. What determines the outcome is whether a national authority exists that can run the programme afterwards.
Domestic balance -
A health system that has to plan for its own patients for forty years
By the end of 2025 Ukrainian health planning had a question no European system has had to answer recently: what does a large cohort of people with permanent…
Humanitarian dimension -
A fourth winter package
By the winter of 2025 the humanitarian winter response had been refined into something quite precise, and the precision was forced by having less money.
Humanitarian dimension -
What reconstruction spending does to an economy
Large inflows of reconstruction money are not simply good news for the receiving economy. Managing them badly produces inflation, an overvalued currency and a distorted labour market.
Economy & Macro -
A fourth winter, and a grid that has learned
Entering the winter of 2025 the Ukrainian power system was still under attack and still standing. What changed was the design philosophy.
Domestic balance -
The regions pulling ahead and falling behind
Regional economic divergence has widened sharply, and the pattern is not the one the pre-war map would have predicted.
Society & Regions -
The ports at full working order
A port is working when a shipowner will send a vessel without a premium, an insurer will cover it and a buyer will sign for delivery. Those three…
Energy & Infrastructure -
Italy and Ukraine: machinery, design and reconstruction
The Italian commercial presence here is built on machinery, components and consumer brands, and it has the characteristic shape of Italian export: many small suppliers rather than a…
Trade & Investment -
Turkish contractors and Ukrainian reconstruction
Turkish construction firms are among the most experienced in the world at building in difficult places. What they can offer Ukraine is specific, and so are the conditions…
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Carbon, soil and a potential new revenue line
Farming practices that hold carbon in the soil could become a second product sold from the same hectare. Whether they will depends on measurement.
Agriculture & Food -
Labour law and social policy alignment
The European employment framework is what a European buyer assumes when auditing a supplier, which makes labour alignment a commercial matter as well as a legal one.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Governance quality, measured
International indices are the standard shorthand for how a country is governed. They are useful, they lag reality, and they measure some things badly.
Politics & Governance -
Holodomor Remembrance Day, 22 November 2025
A remembrance message on an evening that has been kept every year I have been here.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Restructuring debt while the war continues
Ukraine reached agreement with its private bondholders on restructuring its external commercial debt. Doing that during a war, without a default, is not a small technical achievement.
War economy -
What four years of sanctions actually achieved
An honest assessment of the sanctions regime has to separate what it was designed to do from what people hoped it would do.
Foreign relations -
Construction plant capacity for a rebuild
Written from the trade: what machinery a national reconstruction actually consumes, where it comes from, and what it costs to keep running.
Energy & Infrastructure -
The energy transition and the industrial cost base
A carbon border mechanism at the European frontier changes the economics of Ukrainian steel and cement, and the response has to be technical rather than rhetorical.
Economy & Macro -
The environmental chapters and their price tag
Environment is the most expensive chapter to implement in any accession, by a wide margin, and the cost falls mostly on municipalities and industry rather than on the…
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Rural development beyond agriculture
A village next to highly productive fields can still be emptying. What keeps people in it is not the harvest but the school, the clinic and the road.
Agriculture & Food -
Accession negotiation, cluster by cluster
The thirty-odd negotiating chapters are grouped into six clusters, opened and closed as blocks. Knowing which cluster contains what tells you where the difficulty sits.
Politics & Governance -
Day of Ukrainian Writing and Language 2025
Twenty-one years of speaking it, and the last of these notes I expect to write about learning rather than about using.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Institutions that outlast governments
Some Ukrainian institutions have survived every change of government since they were created. Identifying what they have in common is more useful than praising them.
Politics & Governance -
The diaspora as an investor, not just a sender
Ukrainians abroad send money home in enormous volumes and invest at home in very small ones. Closing that gap is a policy question with a large prize.
Economy & Macro -
Ukrainian agriculture and the Common Agricultural Policy
Accession would place a very large agricultural producer inside a budget designed without it. The arithmetic is real and so are the answers to it.
Agriculture & Food -
Integration before membership
A country can join a great deal of the European system without joining the Union, and Ukraine has been doing exactly that, sector by sector.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Ukraine Market Report — Q3 2025
A fourth harvest exported through the corridor without incident, and an economy in which the wartime arrangements have become simply the way things are done.
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
Becoming part of the European energy market
Synchronising the physical grid was the visible step. Market coupling — trading electricity on the same terms as everyone else — is the longer and less visible one.
Energy & Infrastructure -
Preparing a company for the single market
A company that starts preparing on the day of accession is five years behind one that started now. This is the practical list.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
The Western Balkans and the cost of delay
Several countries have been candidates for European membership for well over a decade. What happened to them is the most important cautionary material available to Ukraine.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Reconstruction and the climate commitment
Recovery money arrives with environmental conditions attached. Treating them as an imposition misses that most of them reduce the operating cost of what is being built.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Working while the door is held
Opening negotiating clusters requires unanimity, and unanimity can be withheld. What a candidate does in that situation is the interesting question.
Foreign relations -
Ukraine and Moldova on parallel tracks
Two candidates received status on the same day and are negotiating in parallel. They are very differently sized and the comparison is more useful than it looks.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Veterans in the construction economy
A large number of people returning from service, and a construction sector short of tens of thousands of workers. The match is obvious and it does not happen…
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Training the people who will do the repairs
A damaged fresco can wait. A country with no trained conservators cannot repair it whenever it chooses, and by 2025 the training question had become the central one.
Culture and identity -
Building for a population that has to want to come back
Reconstruction assumes people will return. That assumption is a decision made by millions of individuals, and it is made on entirely practical grounds.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
The Union has to change too
Enlargement is usually discussed as something that happens to candidates. It also forces open budget, voting and institutional questions inside the Union.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Who does the clearing
The constraint on demining is trained people, and by 2025 the composition of that workforce had changed in a way worth recording.
Domestic balance -
A doctor for a village with no doctor
The hardest healthcare gap in Ukraine is not surgical capacity. It is a functioning family doctor in a small community near the front.
Humanitarian dimension -
Finding children and keeping records
Among the most difficult humanitarian work in Ukraine is the identification, tracing and documentation of children separated from their families.
Humanitarian dimension -
Knowledge Day 2025
The first of September, and the year I finished an MBA in the same city where I once arrived unable to read the street signs.
National Days & Anniversaries -
A fourth school year, and what four years of disruption looks like
By September 2025 a child starting the fifth grade had never had an uninterrupted school year. Assessing what that means, and what is being done about it, requires…
Culture and identity -
Rebuilding without deepening regional gaps
Reconstruction money follows damage, and damage is concentrated. That is correct and it produces a second-order problem worth naming in advance.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Airports and the aviation sector on hold
Ukrainian civil aviation stopped entirely in February 2022. What restarting it requires is more than reopening the airspace.
Energy & Infrastructure -
Nuclear safety under conditions nobody designed for
Ukraine generates a majority of its electricity from nuclear plants. Keeping them safe during a war has required an international presence with no real precedent.
Domestic balance -
The money Ukraine raised from its own citizens
A significant share of Ukraine's wartime borrowing has come from its own population and banks. That is unusual and it matters for more than the arithmetic.
War economy -
The year Europe stopped buying
The most consequential economic measure of this whole period was not a sanctions package. It was European energy demand moving away from a single supplier permanently.
Foreign relations -
Independence Day 2025: the arithmetic of recovery
Thirty-four years. Reconstruction is no longer a conference topic but a procurement pipeline, and the constraint on it turns out to be neither money nor politics but the…
National Days & Anniversaries -
Moving materials to where they are needed
A reconstruction programme is, in tonnage terms, mostly a haulage exercise. Whether the tonnage can physically move is a question asked too late.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
The machines that do the rebuilding
Reconstruction requires excavators, crushers, concrete plants and crane capacity. Ukraine does not have enough of them, and that is a more immediate constraint than money.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Supplying materials at reconstruction scale
Cement, steel, bitumen and aggregate are the four inputs that determine whether a construction programme is possible, and each has a different constraint.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Building to European standards from the start
A building designed to Eurocodes is accession-ready, insurable, financeable and comprehensible to a foreign contractor. One designed to the old norms is none of those.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Statehood Day, 15 July 2025
A greeting for a young holiday about a very old claim.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Can a city borrow to rebuild itself
A community with its own tax revenue could in principle borrow against it. What stands between that principle and a signed loan is mostly accounting.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Ukraine Market Report — Q2 2025
Accession negotiations proceeded technically while the opening of chapters remained blocked politically, illustrating a distinction that matters commercially more than the headlines suggest.
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
Rome: from principles and pledges to a pipeline
Lugano wrote the principles. London addressed the risk. The Rome conference in July 2025 dealt with the thing that follows both: a pipeline of actual projects, with actual…
War economy -
Ivana Kupala, 7 July 2025
A midsummer greeting for a fourth wartime Kupala, and a note on the children who have never seen the full version.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Concessions and partnerships in recovery
Public-private partnership is proposed for almost everything in reconstruction and suits a narrow set of projects. Knowing which set saves a great deal of wasted preparation.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Constitution Day, 28 June 2025
A greeting for Constitution Day, marked in a year when the text is being tested.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Getting private capital into reconstruction
Public money and development bank lending will not cover the bill. Private capital will come only where the risk is shared and the revenue is identifiable.
Reconstruction & Recovery -
From plans to a pipeline
Reconstruction financing has been available for some time. What was missing was a supply of projects prepared well enough to receive it.
War economy -
Museums that reopened
A museum that reopens is making a statement about the future tense. By 2025 many Ukrainian institutions had brought collections back out of storage and opened their doors.
Culture and identity -
Cohesion policy and how regional money works
European regional funding is not a transfer to a government. It is a project machine with rules, and running it requires an administration built for the purpose.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Land released, and what happens the day after
Clearance is measured in hectares released. What matters is whether the hectare is farmed the following season, and that is a separate problem.
Domestic balance -
The infection problem in war wounds
Antimicrobial resistance in complex war injuries is one of the most serious medical problems of this period, and one of the least discussed.
Humanitarian dimension -
Consortium models for reconstruction contracting: who does what and who carries what
Almost no reconstruction work will be delivered by a single company operating alone. The consortium structures that will do the work have predictable shapes, and the terms are…
Reconstruction & Recovery -
The fourth year, and the funding problem nobody solves
Humanitarian need in Ukraine did not fall in 2025. Humanitarian funding did, and the gap between those two facts is the central problem of this period.
Humanitarian dimension -
Agriculture: the hardest chapter
Ukraine is a very large agricultural producer joining a union whose agricultural policy is its most politically defended. That is the central difficulty of the whole accession.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Storage, and the value of an hour
By 2025 the most valuable addition to the Ukrainian grid was not new generation. It was batteries, and the reason is a matter of timing rather than volume.
Domestic balance -
Paying for a war and preparing for accession at the same time
By 2025 external financing to Ukraine was doing two jobs at once, and the second one is the more consequential.
War economy -
What listing an individual actually does
Thousands of individuals have been listed. The effect is not what most people assume, and understanding it correctly matters for judging the regime.
Foreign relations -
Restoring what cannot be replaced
A damaged historic building presents a question ordinary construction never has to answer: how much of it can be renewed before it stops being the thing that was…
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Screening: the year of reading two legal systems against each other
The least visible phase of accession is the one that determines everything that follows. Through 2024 and 2025 Ukrainian and European officials worked chapter by chapter through the…
Foreign relations -
Vyshyvanka Day, 15 May 2025
A greeting for a day that is now worn in a great many countries at once, by people who did not plan to be there.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Training the workforce reconstruction will need
A rebuild needs welders, machine operators, electricians and site foremen. Those are trained in vocational schools, and vocational education was thin here long before 2022.
Culture and identity -
The internal market chapters
Goods, services, capital and company law. This is the cluster a business notices, because it changes what it may sell, where and under what documentation.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Master planning for towns that must be rebuilt
A destroyed town can be rebuilt as it was, or as it should have been. The second is better and much harder, and the difference is decided by…
Reconstruction & Recovery -
Easter, 20 April 2025
An Easter greeting for a year when the calendars aligned and everyone marked it on the same day.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Ukraine Market Report — Q1 2025
The first quarter in which no russian gas crossed Ukrainian territory since the pipeline network was built. The transit era ended quietly and the European gas market absorbed…
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
Integration before membership
Ukraine has been joining European systems one at a time without waiting for accession. That approach delivers benefits decades before membership does.
Foreign relations -
Financing that arrives on a schedule
By 2025 Ukraine external financing had become something it had not been in 2022: routine. Instalments arriving against a published plan, on dates known in advance, from instruments…
War economy -
Universities that moved and kept teaching
Several Ukrainian universities relocated entirely and continued operating. What that required, and what it means for the regions they left, is worth setting out.
Culture and identity -
Bringing things back
By 2025 the heritage effort had a third component alongside protection and documentation: the slow legal work of getting objects returned.
Culture and identity -
Insuring what cannot be guaranteed
A factory cannot be financed if it cannot be insured, and no commercial underwriter will price a risk they cannot model. Solving that has been the central unlock…
War economy -
Rehabilitation is the part that lasts
Emergency medicine saves a life in an afternoon. Rehabilitation decides what that life looks like for the next forty years, and by 2025 Ukraine was building it from…
Humanitarian dimension -
When the target moved to gas
Attacks on gas production and storage in the winter of 2025 changed the problem again, and the response drew on a European system Ukraine was already part of.
Domestic balance -
The return question, examined honestly
Millions of Ukrainians are living abroad. How many come back is the single most consequential variable in the country's future, and it is decided household by household.
Society & Regions -
The third year: an economy that learned to function under conditions it was never designed for
Three years in, the striking thing is not the damage but the adaptation. Businesses operate through scheduled outages, exports move by routes that did not exist, and the…
Economy & Macro -
Building the machines instead of importing them
Mechanical demining machines are specialised, expensive and were in short supply worldwide. By 2025 Ukraine was manufacturing them, and an industry had formed around a problem.
Domestic balance -
Three years, sixteen packages
By the third anniversary the sanctions regime had become an institution rather than a series of decisions, and institutions behave differently from decisions.
Foreign relations -
From relief to durable solutions
Humanitarian assistance in a long displacement has to stop being relief and become something else: housing people can stay in, work they can do, and a decision they…
Humanitarian dimension -
Ukraine Annual Review 2024: the constraint moves to people
Export logistics solved, financing put on a multi-year basis, accession negotiations opened, generating capacity lost and rebuilt around — and a labour shortage that no amount of money…
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
Day of Unity, 22 January 2025
A unity day greeting in a fourth year of war, and what the word has come to mean in practice.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Ukraine Market Report — Q4 2024
The gas transit agreement expired at the end of December and was not renewed, ending a transit relationship that had operated since Soviet times and closing a chapter…
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
New Year, 1 January 2025
A new year greeting at the start of a fourth wartime year, kept to what can honestly be wished.
National Days & Anniversaries
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