Make the URC a Ukraine Resilience Conference

This is part of a pair of articles highlighting the two most urgent impediments to a productive Ukraine Recovery Conference in June. The other article can be found here.

Russia has adapted its strategy for the war in Ukraine. Airstrikes against power generation facilities aim to make Ukrainian cities unlivable. Russia is currently laying waste to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, by launching attacks from an effectively US-granted safe harbor on the Russian side of the border. And disinformation in the West has become the Russian strategy that matters most to the outcome of the war.

Unfortunately, instead of similarly adapting to ensure Ukrainian survival, the German government is framing the biggest annual conference to rally international support for Ukraine—the Ukraine Recovery Conference (URC), to be hosted in Berlin on June 11–12—around the same old issue set that needed to be elevated at the past two URCs: recovery and reconstruction. Pivoting to a Ukraine Resilience Conference would mean focusing on strategic communications, energy generation, and weapons.

Evolution of the R in URC: From reform to recovery to resilience

The first URC was co-hosted by the UK and Ukraine in 2017, when reforms in Kyiv were faltering and at the same time Ukraine and its allies worried that the new US president, Donald Trump, was uninterested in supporting Ukraine. The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the event was designed to “unite all of our most loyal partners around supporting Ukraine”. The URCs in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021 all focused on key reform results delivered over the prior year and reform priorities for the following year.

The next URC came in July 2022, when Ukraine was beating back the full-scale Russian invasion, and it was not the right time for a conference about Ukrainian “reform”. In this moment of optimism that Ukraine would win the war relatively quickly and that the greatest need would then be rebuilding the country, the URC was renamed the Ukraine Recovery Conference, a label that has stuck for the URCs of 2023 and 2024. A key proponent of this emphasis on recovery was Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who seems more comfortable dedicating public diplomacy to the positive agenda to win the peace than the harder debates over winning the war.

These international recovery conferences successfully initiated important bureaucratic processes within the European Union—especially those leading to the €50 billion Ukraine support facility—and in the G7 with the establishment of its donor coordination platform. International mobilization was joined by corresponding moves within Ukraine to reorganize a ministry and agency for restoration and build new civil society coalitions. Notwithstanding setbacks such as Kyiv’s recent removal of its deputy prime minister for restoration, these efforts continue to bear fruit. They not only coordinate current recovery and rebuilding needs, but also integrate these plans and associated reforms into the EU accession process and lay the groundwork for larger-scale postwar reconstruction. As with humanitarian relief, recovery must continue to varying degrees and in stages across different parts of Ukraine.

However, while it is important for all that work to continue, recovery is no longer the top priority that Ukrainians want to elevate ahead of the URC in 2024. Over the past year, three assumptions that drove the 2022–2023 focus on recovery and reconstruction have become overconfident: that Ukraine would quickly retake its territory and neutralize the security threat; that Ukraine’s allies—especially the governments of the United States and Germany—would continue to stand strong and united for the foreseeable future; and that public and private funding for reconstruction would be plentiful. As they hunker down to survive a long war, Ukrainians have grown sick and tired of hearing about “recovery and reconstruction”, words that have become toxic in Ukraine. A few civil society leaders in Kyiv are even considering boycotting the URC.

Instead of repeating the recovery theme that felt timely in 2022, the URC in 2024 should focus on the new order of the day, which is resilience for survival and victory.

Resilience priorities: Cognitive strength, energy generation, and weapons

Pivoting to a Ukraine Resilience Conference is feasible without severely disrupting the broad contours of the recovery conference the 2024 organizers have already planned, including its “whole of society” approach with four thematic dimensions covering business, human, local, and EU/reform issues. Indeed, the ability of the whole of Ukrainian society to self-organize in response to shocks is the core of resilience, a concept that Chatham House associates with five similar pillars. The only pillar of resilience that is not clearly covered in a conference about recovery is “cognitive strength”, which is especially important among Ukraine’s international partners at a time when disinformation is the Kremlin’s strategy that matters most to the outcome of the war. Covering this issue at the URC would mean adding discussions about how false Kremlin narratives about Ukraine and the war contribute to a political environment in which Western powers are consistently slow in delivering aid—and about how to counter those narratives.

But beyond the inclusion of this fifth pillar, a conference dedicated to resilience would narrow the priorities to the most important needs. Having returned directly from Ukraine to moderate a panel at a pre-URC conference in Berlin, former German member of the European Parliament Rebecca Harms said the two issues on which Ukrainians are most urgently expecting results are “energy and weapons”.

Although Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilian energy infrastructure have been ongoing since 2022, the specific type of target has shifted in recent months from transmission networks to power plants and other facilities that are critical to generating energy for heat and electricity. According to Olena Halushka, co-founder of the International Center for Ukrainian Victory, Russia has severely damaged or destroyed more than 70% of Ukraine’s thermal and hydro power generation facilities, aiming to produce an even larger humanitarian crisis by next winter. Power generation is needed to heat homes, keep the lights on, run water, and operate hospitals and subways. Without sufficient energy, Ukrainian cities would become uninhabitable and millions would be displaced. At the URC, the G7 should commit to equipping all major Ukrainian cities with powerful industrial diesel generators and enhancing Ukraine’s air defense capabilities—including the deployment of radio-electric jammers—to protect against further attacks on heat and power plants.

Shooting down a majority of Russian drones and missiles over Ukrainian skies—the way Israel, the United States and other allies did against an Iranian attack in April—would require more sophisticated weapons systems. Ukraine currently has three Patriot batteries and has yet to receive any F-16s from the United States. According to former US ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, it needs at least nine more Patriots and well over 100 F-16s. The most important and plausible deliverables at the URC in June and the NATO summit in July would be a US decision to arrange the transfer of the F-16s with necessary avionics and missiles and a commitment from the allies—including countries such as Spain and Greece that are not in harm’s way, but are nevertheless sitting on nine unused Patriot batteries between them—to redeploy as needed to fully protect Ukrainian skies.

It is also essential that the White House allows Ukraine to deploy US-provided weapons to hit bases just across the border in Russia. Former Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland recommends relaxing the US ban against firing American weapons into Russia by permitting Ukraine to target bases in Russia where “attacks are coming directly from over the line in Russia … whether they are where missiles are being launched from or … where troops are being supplied from”. This is an issue on which GMF has helped Ukrainian parliamentarians get their message out, resulting in influential reporting and signs of a shifting debate.

The URC mobilizes participation from across the societies of Ukraine and its allies more energetically than any other annual conference dedicated to Ukraine. It would be a shame if, at a time when Russia is destroying Ukrainian cities, energy, and lives, the URC remains focused on the eventual rebuilding of Ukraine rather than on bolstering the resilience that will limit the amount of rebuilding ultimately needed and—most importantly—save Ukrainians now as they fight for survival.

This work was produced with the generous support of the Smith Richardson Foundation.