Ukraine 2036: The European Power the War Created

By Matthew Parish

Wednesday 9 September 2026

Wars have a peculiar habit of creating countries different from those that entered them. They destroy institutions and build others, discredit assumptions that once appeared permanent and accelerate social changes that in peacetime might have required generations. Above all, they compel societies to discover capacities they did not know they possessed. Ukraine entered the present war as a large but relatively poor European country whose strategic identity remained contested, whose institutions were imperfect, whose population was declining and whose economic relationship with the rest of Europe remained incomplete. She may emerge from it as something substantially different.

It is worth imagining Ukraine in 2036, not because anyone can sensibly predict the world ten years in advance, but because the purpose of a peace settlement should be judged partly by the future it makes possible. I previously considered what sort of peace Ukraine could safely accept. The next question is what she should do with that peace once she has it. The possibilities are considerably more ambitious than merely reconstructing what Russia has destroyed. Ukraine could become one of Europe’s principal military powers, one of its most important centres of defence technology, a major agricultural and energy producer, a substantial industrial economy and a political bridge between the European Union and the states lying beyond its eastern frontier. Her population may remain smaller than it was before the war and the psychological scars will endure for generations. Some of her internationally recognised territory may conceivably remain outside Kyiv’s control. Yet none of these things prevents Ukraine from becoming more powerful after the war than she was before it.

Indeed, the paradox may ultimately be that Vladimir Putin’s attempt to prevent the emergence of a strong, European Ukraine has accelerated precisely that outcome.

The country that will emerge from the war

The first mistake would be to imagine post-war Ukraine as the Ukraine of January 2022 with repaired buildings. Too much has happened for that to be possible and in many respects it would not be desirable. Reconstruction should not mean restoration of the status quo ante. It should mean transformation. The scale of the physical task is already extraordinary. The fifth Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment, prepared jointly by the Ukrainian government, World Bank, European Commission and United Nations, estimated in February 2026 that reconstruction and recovery would require almost $588 billion over the following decade. Direct physical damage had already exceeded $195 billion. Transport alone accounted for more than $96 billion of estimated recovery needs, energy almost $91 billion and housing almost $90 billion. Fourteen per cent of Ukraine’s housing stock had been damaged or destroyed, affecting more than three million households.

These numbers are sufficiently enormous to encourage despair, but there is another way of looking at them. Hundreds of billions of dollars will have to be invested in Ukraine whether anybody likes it or not. The relevant question is whether this money recreates ageing Soviet and post-Soviet infrastructure or constructs one of Europe’s most modern economies. A destroyed electricity substation can be rebuilt as it was, or replaced as part of a distributed and resilient energy network. A ruined industrial district can reproduce yesterday’s factory or accommodate tomorrow’s advanced manufacturing. A damaged railway can be restored to its previous configuration or modernised as part of a transport system increasingly integrated with the European Union. Cities requiring extensive reconstruction can incorporate modern heating, energy efficiency, digital infrastructure and public transport rather than reproducing the vulnerabilities Russia exposed.

The World Bank and Ukrainian government are already moving in this direction. Ukraine’s new energy vision identifies approximately $26 billion of priority investment directed towards a more decentralised, resilient and secure system, while new international financing mechanisms are explicitly intended to use public money to mobilise larger quantities of private investment. The devastation is real, but so is the opportunity to rebuild differently.

Europe’s military state

The most obvious transformation will be military. Ukraine in 2036 is likely to possess Armed Forces radically unlike those she had before 2022, irrespective of whether she eventually joins NATO. Before the full-scale invasion, arguments about European defence frequently took place at conferences. Ukraine has subsequently conducted the largest conventional war fought in Europe since 1945. Her officers have acquired operational experience no Western European army can reproduce through exercises. Her soldiers have learned under the least forgiving circumstances imaginable how to integrate artillery, drones, electronic warfare, intelligence, infantry, air defence and long-range strike systems while adapting continuously to an enemy doing the same.

This accumulated knowledge constitutes national capital. It should not be discarded through mass demobilisation without thought to how it can be preserved. A post-war Ukraine will obviously need a smaller active military than she requires during an existential war, but she should maintain extensive reserves, sophisticated mobilisation systems, large ammunition stocks and a substantial professional core. Veterans should remain connected to reserve formations and training institutions and civil defence should become a permanent component of national organisation.

Most importantly, Ukraine’s military should remain technologically restless. The great lesson of the war has been that the battlefield changes faster than conventional procurement bureaucracies. A successful drone may dominate for several months before electronic countermeasures render it ineffective. Software updates can matter as much as new airframes. Cheap autonomous systems can destroy equipment costing hundreds of times as much. Ukraine has learned to innovate because failure means death and that institutional culture may prove one of her most valuable post-war assets.

The arsenal of Europe

The defence industry built around this experience could become one of Ukraine’s most important economic sectors. This process is already beginning. Germany and Ukraine are finalising arrangements for joint development of drones, missiles and associated software, building upon programmes involving tens of thousands of Ukrainian-produced drones and German-Ukrainian industrial cooperation. Ukraine is simultaneously securing approximately 1,000 Patriot missiles with allied assistance and European financing, although many will arrive only over future years.

The implications extend far beyond Ukraine. Europe has discovered during this war that her defence-industrial capacity is inadequate for sustained high-intensity conflict. Production lines are too small, procurement cycles too slow and many systems extraordinarily expensive. Ukraine has discovered the opposite lesson: when survival is at stake, military technology must be manufactured rapidly, modified continuously and produced at a cost permitting enormous quantities to be used. These two industrial cultures can complement one another.

German engineering, French aerospace, British defence technology, Scandinavian electronics, American capital and Ukrainian battlefield innovation could form increasingly integrated supply chains. Ukrainian companies need not remain subcontractors producing cheap drones. They can become multinational defence enterprises exporting systems, software and expertise throughout Europe and beyond. By 2036 Kyiv, Lviv, Dnipro and other Ukrainian cities could sit at the centre of a European defence-technology ecosystem extending from artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles to electronic warfare, missile systems, battlefield communications and cyber security.

Russia sought to demilitarise Ukraine. She may instead have created Europe’s arsenal.

The demographic wound

The greatest constraint upon this optimistic vision is not money. It is people. Ukraine’s demographic problems preceded the war. Low birth rates, emigration and an ageing population were already shrinking the country. The war then displaced millions, killed and wounded enormous numbers of Ukrainians and separated families across Europe.

Not everybody will return and this needs to be accepted rather than disguised behind patriotic rhetoric. A Ukrainian family that has spent eight years in Germany by the time a durable peace arrives may have children speaking fluent German, attending German schools and imagining German futures. A professional who has built a career in Warsaw, Prague or London may not abandon it merely because politicians announce that reconstruction has begun. Ukraine therefore cannot base her future upon commanding people to return. She must make them want to.

That requires salaries, housing, schools, health care, security and opportunity. It also requires a cultural change in the relationship between the Ukrainian state and the diaspora. Ukrainians who remain abroad should not be treated as people who deserted the country. They should be understood as an international network of extraordinary economic value. A Ukrainian engineer in Munich, banker in London, academic in Boston or entrepreneur in Warsaw may contribute to Ukraine without immediately living there. She can invest, establish businesses, transfer technology, mentor companies and connect Ukrainian institutions to foreign ones. Some will eventually return. Others may live between countries.

The Ukraine of 2036 may therefore contain fewer people physically within her borders than Ukraine once did while possessing a much larger economic and professional network extending across Europe. Population matters, but connectivity matters as well.

Veterans and the social contract

No post-war issue will require greater sensitivity than the place of veterans. Ukraine will contain an enormous number of people who have experienced combat, injury, bereavement and prolonged separation from civilian life. Some will return to ordinary employment relatively easily. Others will carry physical or psychological injuries for the remainder of their lives. The state will owe these people more than medals.

Veteran policy must therefore become part of economic policy rather than being confined to welfare ministries. Military skills need translating into civilian qualifications. Employers will need incentives and guidance. Disabled veterans will require accessible cities and workplaces and rehabilitation will have to be available throughout the country rather than concentrated in a handful of institutions. There is also a political question. Veterans will possess enormous moral authority in post-war Ukraine. This is natural, but it creates risks as well as opportunities. A healthy democracy must honour military service without allowing possession of military credentials to become a substitute for political argument.

Ukraine’s achievement since 2022 has been to remain fundamentally a civilian state fighting a terrible war rather than becoming a military regime. She should preserve that distinction after victory or peace. The soldier protects the republic, but the soldier does not own it.

The return of politics

Peace will also restore political arguments suppressed or transformed by wartime necessity. This will be healthy, although it may initially appear alarming. Ukraine after the war will argue about responsibility for wartime decisions, reconstruction contracts, taxation, demobilisation, relations with Russia, language, corruption, veterans, refugees, elections and the distribution of enormous quantities of international money. Some of these debates will be vicious.

This does not mean Ukrainian democracy is failing. It means politics has returned. The temptation after an existential war is to imagine that national unity must continue indefinitely. It cannot and should not. Democracies exist precisely because citizens disagree about what their countries ought to become. The more important issue will be whether Ukrainian institutions can channel these disagreements peacefully while preventing oligarchic structures from reconstituting themselves around reconstruction money.

This is where European Union accession becomes transformative.

The European discipline

Ukraine’s accession to the European Union is sometimes discussed as though it were principally a geopolitical prize bestowed upon her for wartime courage. It is more important than that. EU accession is an institutional machine. In June 2026 the European Union opened the first negotiating cluster with Ukraine, covering the fundamentals: judiciary and fundamental rights, justice and security, public procurement, statistics and financial control. This cluster is deliberately opened first and closed last because progress upon it determines the pace of the entire accession process.

These subjects sound painfully bureaucratic and that is their virtue. Ukraine’s future will not ultimately be secured by stirring speeches about European civilisation. It will be secured by procurement rules, independent courts, predictable regulation, competition policy, financial controls and public administration capable of spending enormous sums without losing them to corruption. The reconstruction programme and EU accession process should therefore become the same project.

Every railway rebuilt to European standards, every procurement procedure made transparent, every court reformed and every market opened brings Ukraine simultaneously closer to prosperity and membership. This is also why Europe should resist any temptation to waive standards because Ukraine has suffered heroically. Sympathy is not institutional reform. Accelerating procedures may be justified; abandoning requirements is not. Ukraine needs EU membership to change her, not merely to congratulate her.

The reconstruction economy

Almost $588 billion of estimated reconstruction needs sounds impossible when compared with the size of Ukraine’s economy. It becomes less impossible when understood as a decade-long mobilisation of Ukrainian, European, American and international capital. Public money will necessarily lead. Roads, bridges, demining, electricity networks and public buildings cannot wait for private investors to discover profitable business models. Yet public money should be designed wherever possible to unlock private capital rather than replace it.

Political risk insurance will be critical. Private investors do not need Ukraine to become risk-free because no emerging market is risk-free. They need risks to become measurable and insurable. Once that happens, capital can move extraordinarily quickly. Ukraine has several natural advantages: a well-educated population, substantial agricultural resources, mineral deposits, proximity to the European single market, comparatively low labour costs, a growing technology sector and the industrial capabilities produced by the war. Reconstruction itself will create demand on a scale capable of supporting domestic industries in construction materials, engineering, energy, logistics and financial services.

The danger will be allowing Ukraine to become merely a gigantic construction site financed by foreigners and supplied by foreign companies. The money must leave behind Ukrainian productive capacity.

Energy independence

Energy may offer one of the greatest opportunities. Russia has repeatedly attacked Ukraine’s energy infrastructure because centralised power systems contain obvious vulnerabilities. Large generating stations and substations make attractive targets. The rational response is not merely stronger air defence around yesterday’s system but a different system.

Ukraine’s post-war energy network should combine nuclear power, renewables, storage, distributed generation, interconnection with European grids and local systems capable of continuing to operate when parts of the network fail. A more resilient Ukrainian energy system could eventually become an exporter as well as a defensive asset. Integration with European electricity markets would turn geography to Ukraine’s advantage. Large-scale renewable generation, nuclear expertise and future storage capacity could make Ukraine an important component of Europe’s energy security.

Again there is an irony. Russia spent years attempting to weaponise European dependence upon Russian energy. Her war may ultimately accelerate the construction of an energy system in which both Europe and Ukraine need Russia considerably less.

Agriculture beyond grain

Ukraine will remain an agricultural power, but she should aspire to export fewer raw commodities and more value. The old model in which enormous quantities of grain, sunflower oil and other agricultural products travel through Black Sea ports will remain important. Yet exporting raw grain captures less economic value than processing food, manufacturing agricultural technology, developing biotechnology and building sophisticated supply chains around one of the world’s great agricultural regions.

Post-war demining will be essential to this. Peace does not make land safe overnight and mines and unexploded ordnance will remain long after the final missile is fired. Yet agricultural reconstruction also offers opportunities for modernisation. Automation will become increasingly important in a country with labour shortages. Precision agriculture, autonomous machinery, satellite data and artificial intelligence can increase productivity while reducing dependence upon a shrinking rural workforce.

Ukraine need not merely remain Europe’s breadbasket. She can become one of Europe’s principal agricultural technology laboratories.

The technological dividend of war

War has forced Ukrainian technology to develop in peculiar directions, but the underlying capabilities are transferable. Autonomous navigation, machine vision, secure communications, electronic warfare, distributed manufacturing, artificial intelligence and rapid software development have civilian applications extending far beyond defence.

The historical analogy is imperfect but instructive. Technologies developed or accelerated by twentieth-century wars subsequently transformed civilian aviation, medicine, computing, telecommunications and logistics. Ukraine should consciously engineer the same transition. Defence companies should be encouraged to develop civilian divisions. Universities should build programmes around technologies in which Ukrainian industry possesses distinctive experience and venture capital should be attracted to companies whose wartime innovations have commercial applications.

The danger is that the defence sector becomes an isolated state-supported enclave. The opportunity is that it becomes the technological engine of the wider economy.

A different geography of Europe

Ukraine’s transformation would also alter Europe’s internal geography. For decades the political and economic centre of the European Union has lain overwhelmingly in its west. Enlargement shifted it eastwards, but Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux countries continued to dominate the Union’s economic imagination. A successful Ukrainian accession would change this.

Ukraine is a large country. Even after wartime demographic losses she would be one of the Union’s more populous members. Her agricultural sector is enormous, her military significance is self-evident and her territory extends the European political space deep towards the Black Sea and the post-Soviet world. Ukraine would naturally develop particularly close relationships with Poland, the Baltic states, Romania, the Nordic countries and other states whose perceptions of Russia have been transformed or vindicated by the war.

This could shift Europe’s strategic centre of gravity eastwards. The consequences would extend beyond Russia policy. Questions of defence expenditure, energy, enlargement, relations with the Caucasus and Black Sea security would acquire greater importance within European politics. Ukraine would not merely join Europe. She would change Europe.

The relationship with Poland

This will make the relationship between Ukraine and Poland particularly important. The two countries possess historical grievances capable of being exploited by nationalists on both sides. They also possess strategic interests that overlap to an extraordinary degree.

Poland provides Ukraine with a physical gateway into the European economy. Ukraine provides Poland with strategic depth against Russia. Their combined populations, military capabilities, industrial bases and geographic position would give a close Polish-Ukrainian partnership considerable influence within the European Union. Wars produce strange historical reversals. For centuries the lands between the Baltic and Black Seas were repeatedly the objects of competition between larger empires. A successful Poland and a successful Ukraine, embedded within European institutions and cooperating in defence, infrastructure and energy, would turn that geography from a vulnerability into power. This does not require romanticising their history. It requires understanding their future.

Russia after peace

A durable peace will not make Russia disappear. Nor should Ukrainian strategy depend upon her becoming democratic, liberal or friendly. Ukraine should hope for a peaceful and prosperous Russia because prosperous neighbours are generally preferable to collapsing nuclear-armed ones. But she should plan upon the assumption that Russia may remain authoritarian, resentful and revisionist for decades.

This is another reason why post-war Ukrainian strength matters more than post-war Russian intentions. Intentions change. Capabilities endure. A Ukraine protected only because a particular Russian government happens temporarily to prefer peace is not secure. A Ukraine whose military, economy and alliances make renewed invasion prohibitively expensive remains secure even when political winds in Moscow change.

The objective should therefore not be eternal hostility towards Russia, but strategic independence from Russian goodwill. One day relations may normalise. Trade may return. Families divided by politics may reconnect and a different generation of Russians may regard the war as the catastrophe it was. Ukraine should leave that possibility open. She should never again make her survival depend upon it.

The occupied territories

If a peace settlement leaves some Ukrainian territory under Russian control, the issue will remain politically painful long after the guns fall silent. Ukraine should resist allowing this unresolved question to consume her national future.

The most powerful strategy may be comparative success. If Ukrainians living in territory controlled by Kyiv enjoy rising prosperity, European citizenship, political freedom, modern infrastructure and increasing opportunities while those in Russian-controlled territory experience stagnation, the argument about Ukraine’s future will gradually answer itself. This does not guarantee reunification. History offers no such guarantees. But it creates strategic patience.

A country confident in her future does not need every historical dispute resolved immediately. She can wait.

Ukraine’s soft power

Something else has changed during the war that is difficult to quantify economically: the world knows Ukraine. Before 2022 many foreigners struggled to distinguish Ukraine from Russia. Ukrainian history, literature, music and political identity were poorly understood outside specialist circles. The invasion changed this brutally.

Ukraine now possesses international recognition and sympathy on a scale no public-relations campaign could have purchased. The challenge after the war will be converting wartime sympathy into enduring cultural influence. Universities, publishing, film, music, tourism, technology conferences and international institutions all matter. Lviv, Kyiv and Odesa should aspire to become major European intellectual and cultural centres. Ukrainian universities should attract foreign students rather than merely attempting to prevent Ukrainian students leaving.

A country’s power is partly the number of people who want to visit her, study her language, read her writers, invest in her companies and understand her history. Ukraine has acquired the world’s attention. She should keep it.

The danger of disappointment

None of this will happen automatically. Indeed the years immediately after peace may be psychologically more difficult than many expect because during war there is a clear national objective: survival. After war, expectations fragment.

Soldiers will expect recognition, refugees will expect homes, businesses will expect contracts, foreign donors will expect reform, citizens will expect corruption to disappear and local communities will expect reconstruction. Politicians will promise prosperity and all of these expectations will collide with limited administrative capacity and finite money. There will be scandals, failed projects and political arguments over who receives what first. There may be recessionary effects as wartime expenditure declines and soldiers demobilise. Some refugees will not return, some foreign investors will remain cautious and some regions will recover faster than others.

A post-war boom can therefore coexist with profound social dissatisfaction. Ukraine’s political leaders should prepare the public for this now. Reconstruction may be extraordinary, but it will not be magical.

The corruption test

The greatest self-inflicted danger will remain corruption. Hundreds of billions of dollars flowing through a country undergoing rapid reconstruction create extraordinary opportunities for enrichment. Every road contract, energy project, housing programme and defence procurement exercise carries risks.

Ukraine has made substantial progress in constructing anti-corruption institutions, but the post-war reconstruction economy will test them on an unprecedented scale. Here again the European accession process is indispensable. Public procurement, judicial reform, financial control and the rule of law are not bureaucratic obstacles placed in Ukraine’s path by Brussels. They are the mechanisms determining whether reconstruction produces a modern European economy or another generation of oligarchs.

There will inevitably be corruption. The relevant question is whether the system detects, punishes and reduces it. A democratic state need not contain no thieves. It needs institutions capable of putting thieves in prison.

Ukraine in 2036

Imagine, then, that the peace holds. Ten years have passed. Ukraine is either a member of the European Union or approaching the final stages of accession. Her western border has become less economically significant as infrastructure and markets integrate with those of the Union. Modern railways and roads connect Ukrainian industrial centres with Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary and her electricity system is decentralised and integrated into Europe’s.

New industries have grown around reconstruction. Ukrainian defence companies sell drones, autonomous systems, electronic warfare equipment and battlefield software across NATO and allied markets. Her Armed Forces remain among the largest and most experienced in Europe, backed by extensive reserves and a society that understands civil defence.

Some Ukrainians who fled the war have returned. Others remain in Berlin, Warsaw, London, Toronto or Chicago but invest, work and maintain businesses in Ukraine. The distinction between diaspora and domestic population has become less rigid. Veterans occupy prominent positions throughout society, but civilian democratic institutions remain supreme.

Kyiv is again crowded with restaurants, technology companies, diplomats and students. Lviv has become one of Central Europe’s intellectual and commercial centres. Odesa, if secure and flourishing, resumes her historic role as one of the great Black Sea cities. Dnipro becomes an advanced manufacturing and defence-industrial centre. There are arguments about taxes, pensions, immigration and Brussels regulations. Governments lose elections. Newspapers complain. Politicians are caught stealing money and occasionally go to prison.

In other words, Ukraine becomes normal. That may be the greatest victory imaginable.

What Putin failed to understand

Vladimir Putin appears to have believed in 2022 that Ukrainian statehood was artificial, Ukrainian national identity shallow and Western commitment temporary. Russia’s superior size would eventually resolve the matter. Instead the invasion accelerated Ukrainian nation-building, destroyed much of Russia’s remaining cultural influence within Ukraine, expanded NATO, stimulated European rearmament and embedded Ukraine more deeply within Western institutions than decades of pre-war diplomacy had managed.

The final irony would be economic. Russia launched the war partly because she feared losing Ukraine permanently to the West. If Ukraine emerges from it as a prosperous European power, then Russia will have produced precisely the geopolitical outcome she intended to prevent.

This is why the character of the peace matters so much. Ukraine does not need a treaty giving her everything immediately. She needs a treaty giving her time: time without missiles, time without mobilisation consuming another generation, time for children to return to ordinary schools, time for investors to build factories, time for veterans to construct civilian lives, time for railways, power stations and apartment blocks to rise from the ruins, time for European integration to become irreversible and time for Ukrainian companies to become multinational ones.

If Ukraine receives that time, then the unresolved territorial questions may eventually become less important than they appear today. Maps matter, but countries are more than maps. Their true strength lies in their people, institutions, wealth, technology, culture, alliances and confidence in their own future.

Russia tried to destroy all of these things in Ukraine. She failed. The task of the peace is to give Ukraine ten uninterrupted years in which to demonstrate just how completely she failed.