The final outcome of the war in Ukraine is impossible to know, but one result that now seems out of the question is a total Russian victory. The Ukrainian government will not be toppled. Although it might lose control of some of its territory for a time (or even permanently), Ukraine will continue to exist as a sovereign state. Ukrainians are proving remarkably resilient. But merely persisting as a country is not enough; what Ukraine needs is not just survival but revival. As Stanford University’s Larry Diamond has suggested, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could inadvertently “launch a new wave of democratic progress.” But that won’t happen on its own. The government in Kyiv and its partners should start planning for a postwar reconstruction that would allow Ukraine to become precisely what Russian President Vladimir Putin fears most: a Slavic success story on his border.
The obstacles to Ukraine’s recovery are daunting. Parts of the country have been deliberately bombed to smithereens by Russian artillery. The port city of Mariupol has been encircled for more than 40 days, but its outgunned and undersupplied marines and Azov Battalion refuse to capitulate. As Russian troops retreated from Kyiv, they left behind a denuded landscape and the mutilated bodies of hundreds of civilians in Bucha. More than ten percent of the country’s population of 41 million has fled the country. Another 7.1 million Ukrainians have fled their homes and are internally displaced, waiting out the conflict in safer regions of the country. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, up to 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. Economists estimate that the war has caused $80 billion in damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure alone.
