Understanding Ukraine’s Resiliences: New ZOiS Report Offers Reality Check
Ukraine’s resilience in the face of Russian aggression is no myth. But there has been a tendency to portray it as something immutable and monolithic. A new report looks at how resilience manifests in specific contexts and offers advice for strengthening it in the present and harnessing it for recovery.
Four years into Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, ‘resilience’ is the term that has stuck in most descriptions of the resistance shown by the Ukrainian people and their adaptation to war-related suffering and privations. Yet in assuming that this is a given, we may become blind to variations in resilience over time and space and to the real costs it exacts. The first ZOiS report of 2026 is a critical intervention in the debate on Ukrainian resilience. It strips the term of its mystique and urges us to think in terms of ‘resiliences’ in four different areas: local governance, social care, trauma and the economy. With concrete examples, the authors highlight how resilience is built in practice, where it is stretched to its limits, and – with policymakers in mind – how support for Ukraine can be tailored to sustain it.
A mosaic of local resiliences
The decentralisation process launched in 2014 is often credited with making Ukrainian municipalities – hromadas – more agile in their reactions and thus more resilient to the effects of war. But this local-level resilience is not uniform. Maryna Rabinovych shows significant variation in the nature and degree of resilience shown by local self-governing bodies across Ukraine. For her, Ukraine’s local resilience is therefore ‘a mosaic of multiple local “resiliences”.’ It is also patchier than often assumed. Urban hromadas with greater administrative and financial resources have a clear advantage over poorer rural ones. To address these inequalities, Rabinovych recommends better coordination across different governance levels, capacity building, and mechanisms to ensure that hromadas have a say in decisions on recovery funding.
Backbone of care system at breaking point
Russia's full-scale invasion piled additional pressure on Ukraine's already overburdened care system. The chronic shortages of financial and human resources that pre-date the invasion have become acute at a time when the need for institutionalised care has never been greater. Despite these problems, Ukraine’s healthcare and social service systems have continued to function. Yet Nataliia Lomonosova warns against confusing endurance with resilience. The reality is that most hromadas in Ukraine cannot currently provide even the legally mandated minimum set of social services. And the narrative of resilience belies the fact that ordinary care workers overstretch themselves to the point of exhaustion in order to compensate for deficits in the system. Lomonosova calls for a fundamental reform to address these structural problems and ensure that care workers are retained for recovery.
Trauma and resilience
Researching trauma amid an ongoing war is difficult, but there is reliable evidence that around one-third of the Ukrainian population passes the threshold for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or Complex PTSD. The implications of that for individual and societal resilience are not yet clear, but research in other settings suggests that exposure to traumatic events does not necessarily make people less resilient. In the report, Gwendolyn Sasse presents the results of first wave of the KonKoop Trauma Study on the links between trauma and political attitudes in Ukraine. She also highlights the need for further research, strategic support, and a whole-of-society approach to trauma: ‘It is not an issue that can be left to individuals to address by themselves or postponed, but requires better evidence-based understanding, substantive international and domestic resources, and targeted policymaking now.’
Future-proofing Ukraine’s economy
The war has played havoc with the Ukrainian economy, but thanks to domestic policies and foreign support it has proven quite resilient overall. What this macro-picture hides, however, is variation in resilience across economic sectors, firms and regions. Julia Langbein shows what Ukraine can do to leave its semi-peripheral status behind it and become more integrated in global value chains. Strengthening domestic value creation, upgrading technological capabilities, and diversifying export structures are key transformations on the path to greater economic resilience. Langbein also looks at the tools the EU can use to design an integration strategy that strengthens both Ukraine’s resilience and the Union’s long-term cohesion.
Publication:
Julia Langbein, Nataliia Lomonosova, Maryna Rabinovych and Gwendolyn Sasse: Resilience Reconsidered: Lessons from Ukraine’s Response to War, ZOiS Report 1/2026.
