Agriculture & Food
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.
Page 5 of 86
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration
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…
Politics & Governance
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.
National Days & Anniversaries
Holodomor Remembrance Day, 22 November 2025
A remembrance message on an evening that has been kept every year I have been here.
War economy
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…
Foreign relations
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.
Energy & Infrastructure
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.
Economy & Macro
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.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration
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…
Agriculture & Food
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…
Politics & Governance
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.
National Days & Anniversaries
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.
Browse the analyses
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Quarterly & Annual Reports
110
A continuous record of the Ukrainian market, quarter by quarter and year by year: output, currency, trade, sectors and what each period settled.
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Economy & Macro
61
Growth, inflation, the hryvnia, budgets and the macro-financial programmes that keep Ukraine's economy running.
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Trade & Investment
69
Foreign trade flows, free trade agreements, customs practice and the practical mechanics of entering the Ukrainian market.
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Politics & Governance
47
Elections, governments, parliamentary arithmetic and the institutional reforms that shape the business environment.
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Energy & Infrastructure
46
Gas, electricity, transit, nuclear generation, ports and the transport corridors that connect Ukraine to its markets.
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Reconstruction & Recovery
46
Damage assessment, recovery financing, construction capacity and the institutions being built to spend it well.
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EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration
49
The Association Agreement, DCFTA, candidate status, accession negotiations and the regulatory convergence behind them.
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Agriculture & Food
44
Grain, oilseeds, the land market, export logistics and Ukraine's role in global food supply.
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Society & Regions
57
Demography, labour, migration, regional economies and the human context behind the numbers.
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Folklore & Esoterica
54
The ritual year, the symbols embroidered into cloth and painted onto eggs, the Carpathian practitioners and the philosophers — the older layer beneath modern Ukraine.
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National Days & Anniversaries
298
Independence Day and the other dates in Ukraine's calendar, each read against the state of the country in that year.
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