National Interest

by Luke Zahner

    Whether one likes it or not, Europe will retain the lion’s share of responsibility for the reconstruction of post-war Ukraine.

    As leaders gather this week in Gdansk, Poland, for the annual Ukraine Recovery Conference, the debate is no longer about whether the world can mobilize support for Ukraine. It can and it has. The real test now lies in tying infrastructure recovery, governance, business confidence and EU accession together into a single, cohesive agenda. Ukraine does not suffer from a lack of activity. It suffers from a lack of connective tissue.

    This challenge has been visible for some time. In public remarks at Brookings in August 2024, Penny Pritzker, then the US Special Representative for Ukraine’s Economic Recovery, argued that Ukraine had “economic greatness in its bones,” but needed whole-of-government planning, continued reform, more shovel-ready projects, protected capital and a workforce capable of rebuilding the country.

    Drawing a careful comparison to the Marshall Plan, Pritzker noted the key difference between then and now: after World War II, a single principal actor helped reconstruct many countries; today, many actors are trying to support the reconstruction of one country. Her diagnosis was right: Ukraine’s recovery is not only about mobilizing support, but about organizing that support into a system capable of helping Ukraine rebuild, reform and advance toward EU membership.

    Ukraine has made remarkable progress under unprecedentedly complex circumstances, continuing to advance its recovery agenda while also fighting for its survival. Public investment management has been strengthened. Innovative IT platforms such as DREAM and ProZorro bring visibility and transparency to project implementation and procurement. A strategic investment council prioritizes major state investments and the government has built a single project pipeline of vetted priority projects eligible for support.

    These are extraordinary achievements for a nation under daily bombardment. But sophisticated tools do not equal strategic direction. Better vetting mechanisms can appraise, select and monitor individual projects, but they can’t decide which investments will best drive Ukraine’s broader economic future.

    Ukraine’s partners are deeply engaged, supporting public investment, accession standards, sectoral recovery, municipal reconstruction, anti-corruption measures and delivery capacity. That is precisely why the connective-tissue gap can be hard to identify: each actor experiences it differently—as a question of strategic planning, decentralization, project preparation, donor coordination, investment climate, or political reform.

    Each diagnosis is partly right, but the missing link is systemic: stronger Ukrainian planning capacity, donor activity aligned with Ukraine’s medium-term priorities, recovery projects linked to structural reform and technical assistance tied to private-sector confidence.

    The Marshall Plan comparison remains useful less as a financing analogy than as a reminder that recovery requires scaffolding. The Baltic states offer a useful reference point, especially with next year’s Recovery Conference set for Tallinn, Estonia. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania did not enter the EU through technical compliance alone but through domestic reform, external pressure, capacity building and sustained mentorship from partners. Ukraine’s wartime reality is much harsher, but the principle holds: successful accession requires international partners working inside the system alongside reformers, not simply funding projects or setting benchmarks from the outside.

    This is where the US retreat from Ukraine’s recovery architecture has had real consequences. For years, IMF and World Bank conditionality, EU accession requirements and US political pressure helped advance Ukraine’s difficult reforms. Through USAID, the United States also provided invaluable ground-level execution, embedding technical experts within Ukrainian ministries, convening global donors and maintaining a granular view of how the system worked. With USAID dismantled and US engagement sharply reduced, a major source of pressure, coordination and operational visibility has been removed.

    The EU will necessarily play the central role in Ukraine’s reconstruction and accession path. But scale alone will not solve the coordination problem. The question now is whether the Ukraine Donor Platform, set up by the G7 to coordinate assistance to Ukraine, can function effectively without the strong US role that helped establish it—moving beyond cataloging donor programs to resolve the hard coordination problems that block transformation, including by steering support toward priority projects and unfunded assistance.

    The same connective-tissue problem affects the private sector. Interest and announcements matter, but they do not reliably become investments without credible government priorities, prepared projects, financing tools, risk mitigation, predictable regulation and capable public counterparts.

    In sectors such as energy and defense, urgency has made transactions possible even under wartime conditions. Elsewhere, deal-making has outpaced the enabling environment. Without the right enabling conditions, deal announcements create the appearance of momentum without necessarily producing investment.

    That is why capacity building is not charity and it is not separate from investment. It is market-making infrastructure: groundwork that helps scarce capital move toward viable, strategic, implementable projects. It gives Ukrainian reformers the tools and political backing to open the economy and create conditions for investment in sectors such as critical minerals, energy, infrastructure and defense.

    The goal is not to create new structures that substitute for Ukrainian leadership. It is to recognize that donors and investors are encountering different versions of the same problem: bottlenecks that existing Ukrainian-led mechanisms already face, yet cannot always resolve on their own. Some are strategic; others are technical, political, municipal, financial, or sector-specific. The task is to provide targeted, temporary capacity to overcome them while building domestic capability. If these problems are viewed in isolation, they will be treated in isolation—and Ukraine’s recovery will remain less than the sum of its parts.

    The Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdansk should mark a shift in emphasis: from pledges to pipelines, from deals to enabling conditions, from scattered projects to an integrated recovery effort.

    Ukraine has already proved it can survive, innovate, reform, fight and adapt under impossible conditions. The difficult work now is to strengthen the institutions, coordination and delivery capacity that will carry recovery forward for decades.

    The diagnosis remains correct. The test now is whether Ukraine and its partners can connect the pieces.