2026-08-04 23:23:55
From cyber “breakouts” to new Chinese AI models catching up and a fresh European AI regulation coming into force, the global AI race is accelerating. But who is winning?
The US is still in the lead, and on the heels of Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s disclosures that their models escaped their sandboxes to hack into companies, the White House once again gathered the leaders of America’s top AI labs to review a new framework for vetting frontier models before release. It is voluntary, for now. But with US public opinion on AI souring, the Administration and Congress are asking how much control can and should the government exert over these increasingly powerful capabilities.
And while US firms are still the leaders in the field of frontier AI, the field is getting complicated when it comes to China and the debate over open and closed models. A particularly mind-boggling recent example: when OpenAI’s own models broke out of a sandboxed evaluation and breached Hugging Face, the industry’s main model repository, cleaning up the mess required a capable model with its safety limits relaxed. And the one that worked — not one of the US models — but rather GLM-5.2, an open model from the Chinese lab Z.ai. A US security incident, resolved with “less ethical” Chinese open-source code.
China is narrowing the gap. Its open models now compete at the frontier. Export controls that limit Chinese access to the most advanced tech may be slowing down China’s momentum but clearly are not stopping it. Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s Kimi K3 and Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max rank near the top of the coding and agent leaderboards.
Importantly, both are open-weight — allowing any user to download, modify, and run the models on their own infrastructure — which over 270 American companies acknowledged in a recent letter “create(s) rivalry … across cloud chips, applications, and services … spurs innovation, drives down costs, and distributes the benefits of AI broadly.”
Thanks to government subsidies, Chinese models are creating a price “death zone” for US competitors. DeepSeek’s new V4 Flash performs close to Anthropic’s best coding model at roughly 28 cents for output that costs $25 elsewhere, a 99% discount that helped set off a July price war. China now files the largest volume of generative-AI patents in the world.
But the deeper shift is in hardware, the very thing that US export controls were built to stop. A new report estimates that Huawei could meet half of China’s domestic compute demand by 2028, and a state-backed firm has begun producing advanced DUV lithography machines, needed to manufacture more advanced chips, at home. At July’s World AI Conference in Shanghai, Xi Jinping laid out a vision of Chinese-led, open, globally shared AI. Near-peer in the software, and catching up fast on the silicon beneath it.
While the race between the US and China is heating up, Europe seems to be in a different race altogether. On August 2, the EU AI Act came into effect — its main focus is on labeling AI-generated content and deepfakes, not enabling European AI champions. The EU has also put forth a Tech Sovereignty Package which endorses open-source AI alongside Brussels’ pursuits to control the full software supply chain and revives negotiations on the controversial European Cybersecurity Certification Scheme for Cloud Services (EUCS).
These regulatory initiatives, no matter how well-intentioned to build greater trust, are stifling Europe’s ability to have a seat at the table when it comes to innovation. No European firm or model sits near the top of the frontier model leaderboards; Mistral and Germany’s Fraunhofer-built Soofi are mid-tier at best. European compute still depends on US hyperscalers.
The exception sits outside the EU. In Ukraine, AI-enabled drones now navigate and strike autonomously through Russian jamming, lifting strike success from as low as 20% to as high as 80%. Ukraine’s defense against Russia has turned it into the world’s fastest adopter of battlefield AI. Europe’s edge, for now, lies in using the technology rather than building it.
It depends on what you measure. Capability and capital point to the US. Cost and industrial capacity point to China. Adoption at the sharpest edge points, improbably, to Kyiv. The race the world is watching is not one, it’s really multiple races at once.
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2026-08-04 21:03:00
We were sitting in a radio studio in central Kyiv, where an American volunteer soldier and I were being interviewed about the challenges faced by foreign troops.
As a Ukrainian veteran who sometimes helps them navigate these issues, I shared what I have seen from the inside, while he spoke from his experience serving in the Armed Forces as a foreigner. About 20 minutes into the conversation, the interviewer leaned forward with a question that caught me by surprise.
“Can I ask you something? Why don’t you just go home? Why are you — and so many others — still here?”
The soldier paused before answering.
“I can only speak for myself,” he said. “But I didn’t come to take from Ukraine. I came to protect freedom.”
It wasn’t a rehearsed line. It wasn’t meant to sound heroic. It was simply true.
He had been seriously wounded in combat. Almost everyone in his unit had been killed or wounded. Yet, years later, neither he nor most of his comrades had received their UBD — the document confirming combat participation that opens the door to veteran status in Ukraine.
Without it, they cannot access many of the benefits they earned: free or discounted services, veteran support programs, grants to start a business, and other assistance.
Some volunteers were even told to pay for their UBD, a demand that is openly corrupt and which came from inside their own units. So they paid. And they waited. And months later, many still had nothing.
As a Ukrainian veteran, it is deeply painful to look into the eyes of people who fought in Kherson, Avdiivka, and the 2023 counteroffensive, who were wounded alongside Ukrainian soldiers, and who still struggle with something as basic as military paperwork.
Military documents are much more than a piece of paper. They establish a soldier’s legal relationship with the state. They determine whether someone can prove their service, obtain and use veteran status, access benefits, or navigate countless interactions with public institutions.
Most importantly, they tell a soldier that the country recognizes their service.
Recently, I began trying to understand why one foreign volunteer had still not received his military ID. The deeper I looked, the clearer it became that this was not one person’s problem. It was a symptom of a much larger issue.
The official explanation is straightforward. Five months ago, Ukraine stopped issuing paper military IDs as part of the transition to the digital Army+ system. But because foreign volunteers still cannot access Army+, they are instead issued a temporary A4 paper certificate without a photograph. Officials acknowledge the gap, but say volunteers were “warned” about it in advance.
That’s true, but only up to a point.
First, this problem did not begin with Army+. Long before that, many foreign volunteers were applying for and not receiving military IDs. In some units, receiving one seemed almost random. I know one group of around 40 foreign soldiers in which only three were issued military IDs while everyone else — serving under exactly the same conditions — received nothing. Others have been waiting for the most basic military document since 2022.
Second, many volunteers are never clearly told what’s happening. Instead of receiving an honest explanation, they are usually told that their documents will be ready “soon.” Soon after another signature. Soon after another procedure. Soon after another update. Weeks become months. Months become years.
Third, the temporary document many foreign volunteers receive — the sheet of paper without a photograph mentioned above — is not an adequate substitute for either a military ID or Army+. It creates practical difficulties every time a soldier needs to identify themselves, prove their military status, or access services available to military personnel.
Finally, the bureaucracy is inconsistent. Some Ukrainian units that chose not to adopt Army+ continue issuing the old, paper military IDs.
For Ukrainian soldiers, bureaucratic dysfunction is frustrating, but familiar. We have spent decades learning how to navigate institutions that do not always function as they should. This is a feature of life in many East European countries, where many decades of authoritarian government have weaved a dense and sometimes-impenetrable bureaucratic web.
Foreign volunteers do not understand this, and they do not deserve it.
Many came from countries where institutions generally follow the rules. They expect that if regulations say a document will be issued, it will be issued — or at the very least, that someone will explain why it has not been.
When that does not happen, the consequences extend far beyond paperwork. The problem becomes psychological.
Some begin questioning whether their service matters as much as everyone else’s. Whether they are valued equally. Whether the country they chose to defend truly sees them as part of its armed forces.
That perception may not reflect anyone’s intention. But perceptions shape trust. And trust is a strategic resource.
Ukraine rightly asks democratic societies to continue supporting its fight for freedom. Thousands of foreign volunteers answered that call with something more valuable than political solidarity. They left their homes, families, careers, and safety to defend a country that was not their own because they believed Ukraine’s fight was also a fight for the values they shared.
Those volunteers will eventually return home. They will become veterans, journalists, entrepreneurs, public officials, and community leaders. They will tell others what Ukraine was like, not only on the battlefield, but inside its institutions.
Every unnecessary bureaucratic failure becomes part of that story.
Ukraine cannot control every battlefield outcome. But it can control how it treats the people who volunteered to fight for it.
This is not an argument for special treatment.
It is an argument for consistent procedures, transparent communication, and implementing rules that already exist. Administrative reforms during wartime are difficult. Delays happen. Digital transitions are complicated.
But bureaucracy should never become another battlefield.
Ukraine’s greatest strength has never been bureaucracy. It has always been people willing to defend freedom — Ukrainians and foreigners alike.
Those who volunteered to fight for Ukraine should not have to spend years fighting to prove that they did.
Lera Burlakova is a Democracy Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). She is a Ukrainian journalist and former soldier who served as an infantrywoman from 2014-2017 after joining up following the Russian invasion of Crimea. Her war diary, Life P.S., received the UN Women in Arts award in 2021. She lives in Kyiv and works as the Campaigns and Media Coordinator for the new Amnesty International Ukraine team.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-08-04 01:45:54
Ukraine, with limited manpower, needs asymmetric advantages wherever they can be found. Innovation is decentralized across many Ukrainian units, and across the country, volunteers, engineers, and soldiers are working hand-in-hand to develop new technology.
But there’s a limit to commanders’ capacity to withdraw soldiers from the front to train them on new kit or send them abroad to scout the best equipment for their needs, so foreigners are helping to bridge the gap.
Bryan Pickens, a former US Army Green Beret who has fought in Ukraine, says that any brigade with a premier drone unit also has tech scouts, while Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency (HUR) also has a group, including foreigners, scouting technologies abroad.
It’s a two-way street — Pickens, who carries out the role for Ukrainian special forces, said he is constantly being asked by Western companies to test their equipment in combat.
Obi, the callsign of a special forces operator from New Zealand who has been fighting in Ukraine since 2022, now spends most of his time evaluating emerging military technology. He works with defense companies and helps determine which systems can give Ukrainian forces an edge.
“A big part of the job involves liaising with foreign companies,” he said. “Many prefer working directly with native English speakers, so we’ve become a useful bridge between foreign manufacturers and the regiment.”
Because of the flexibility of his contract, Obi is also able to travel abroad to seek technologies. “Our role is to identify useful systems, negotiate access to them, and then integrate them into special operations,” he said.
And scouts like Obi are particularly important because they have been operators and so understand their units’ battlefield requirements.
“A commander can fly to Poland and watch a demonstration, but that doesn’t mean they’ll understand how the equipment performs under battlefield conditions,” he said. “Operators know whether a drone solves a real problem, whether it introduces new risks, or whether it needs further development.”
Technology scouts also do more than identify promising systems. They test equipment, provide feedback to commanders, and help integrate technology into frontline units.
Obi said about 90% of his time is spent evaluating and integrating technology, while the other 10% is spent directly employing the systems.
“We can have a greater impact off the battlefield,” he said. “The front already has experienced teams conducting operations. Our job is to find solutions that can help all of them.”
A good example of the influence of technology scouts on the battlefield is the use of mid-range drones, which have led the effort against Russian logistics in the occupied territories. Once the Azov Brigade procured US-designed Hornet drones and became the first unit to link them to Starlink low-orbit satellites, their range quickly grew, catching Russia off guard.
But not all Western companies are as supportive as Perennial Autonomy, the California-based developer of the Hornet.
“Most companies show up with promises, deliver a small batch of donated equipment for testing, and then never return,” said Pickens. They then take advantage of the “combat tested” claim, while selling their equipment elsewhere, he added. “There needs to be honest discussions and follow-through on both sides.”
The war has become one of technological attrition. Innovation cycles, especially with unmanned systems, are often compressed into a matter of weeks, and battlefield tech advances can quickly create windows of opportunity.
As the cost of new technology items falls, the ability to scale cheap and effective systems increases the damage inflicted across the battlefield. Ukraine demonstrated this first with first-person-view (FPV) drones, before going on to build drones that increasingly resemble hybrid missiles.
“Any new technology that extends our reach is a clear advantage,” said Heorhii Volkov, commander of the Yasni Ochi (Clear Eyes) drone unit in 2 Corps of the National Guard of Ukraine.
“Where we have an edge is in management and speed of implementation, while Russia’s advantage is sheer quantity and scale,” he said. “Lasting superiority will depend on how fast ideas are adopted and scaled.”
Yet immediate battlefield demands often mean commanders are unable to devote personnel to finding and developing technology.
“Many commanders are reluctant to expand the number of engineers or technology scouts,” said Pavel Shurmei, commander of the Kastuś Kalinoŭski Regiment. “They think ‘we’re short on drone pilots. The pilots we do have need rotation and relief, so there’s no point in increasing the number of engineers.’”
And when units discover effective systems, they don’t always share the lessons.
“If a unit finds a particularly effective system, they often want to keep it to themselves,” Obi said. “Supply is limited, and units worry about creating logistical shortages if everyone starts demanding the same equipment.”
Moscow has learned many of the same lessons. It established the Rubicon Center to accelerate technological adaptation, though its more centralized model tends to innovate more slowly. Once a capability proves successful, however, Russia can often copy and distribute it across much of its military, as happened with the Iranian-designed Shahed drones.
As the war becomes ever more technological, with innovation cycles speeding up, tech scouts are vital in the constant quest for advantage. And for Ukraine, with its limited manpower, technology from across the globe must shoulder more of the burden.
David Kirichenko is a Ukrainian-American freelance journalist who has been covering Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine since 2022, and is an Associate Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. He can be found on X/Twitter @DVKirichenko.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-08-04 00:03:03
The phrase “quantity has a quality of its own” is often attributed (possibly incorrectly) to Joseph Stalin, and captures a persistent feature of Russian and Soviet warfare. Mass comes first, and everything else follows.
Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has pursued the same logic. Moscow has tried to overwhelm Ukraine with more soldiers, weapons and the advantages of a far larger population, economy and defense-industrial base. This imbalance has forced Kyiv to improvise and find ways to compensate.
It has partly done so through innovative forms of asymmetric warfare, and its expanding drone and long-range strike campaign has hit Russian refineries, fuel depots, ports, ships and logistics sites far behind the frontline every single day for weeks. These attacks have disrupted fuel supplies, forced Moscow to divert resources to air defense and demonstrated that Ukraine can impose serious costs.
There is clear pleasure among Ukraine’s supporters at seeing Russia struck with such frequency and to such effect.
But, there’s always a but. Kyiv’s Western allies shouldn’t get carried away. Ukraine’s successes coexist with a darker reflection where Russia continues to inflict grievous damage on its victim.
There are several aspects to this.
While Russia has not achieved the rapid breakthrough it wanted on the battlefield, and its advances remain slow, costly and uneven, it is exerting serious pressure on the fortress belt in Donetsk, around Kostiantynivka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
Small assault groups continuously probe Ukrainian positions while drones, artillery and glide bombs make roads, supply routes and nearby settlements difficult to hold. Russia is also maintaining pressure in the Sumy, Kharkiv, Lyman and Zaporizhzhia sectors, forcing Ukraine to distribute already limited manpower and air-defense resources across a 1,200 km (750 mile) front.
Moscow has also intensified its air campaign, launching repeated combinations of Shahed-type drones, decoys, cruise and ballistic missiles, glide bombs and shorter-range drones.
While Ukraine can tackle many threats (On August 2, it said it had intercepted more than 450,000 aerial targets since the all-out war started), ballistic missiles remain a serious vulnerability as Patriot interceptors are limited and cannot protect every city, industrial facility or strategic site. The difficult truth is that Ukraine lacks ballistic missile interceptors and is near-defenseless against them.
Russia is also zeroing in on the civilian infrastructure that keeps a country functioning. More than 200 filling stations have been hit and Russia now regularly targets them in frontline and border regions. While this has not yet caused a nationwide fuel shortage, such attacks make local movement slower and more dangerous, reduce reliability and compromise emergency services, generators and military transport.
Warehouses, postal facilities and delivery centers play a similar role, enabling the movement of food, medicine, electronics, spare parts and generators to vulnerable regions. Russia’s strikes combine economic damage with pressure on potentially dual-use logistics, while the immediate costs fall on workers, businesses and civilians.
Ports are part of the same campaign, and Russian attacks have hit Odesa, Chornomorsk, Izmail and Mykolaiv, as well as port storage facilities and civilian vessels. Maersk suspended a service through Chornomorsk in July, rerouting cargo through Romania, while other shipowners have paused arrivals.
More than 90% of Ukraine’s agricultural exports are shipped through ports in the Odesa region, meaning even limited disruption raises insurance costs, frightens commercial operators and weakens the country’s principal export corridor.
Moscow claims some of these attacks as retaliation for Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries, distribution hubs and shipping, but Putin’s forces were targeting Ukrainian energy and infrastructure long before Kyiv developed its deep-strike capabilities.
Its broader military logic is that in a war of attrition, limited territorial gains and repeated damage gradually accumulate.
Russian advances often appear negligible in monthly assessments, with its forces gaining only a few kilometers while losing thousands of troops and large quantities of equipment, but Moscow does not need every offensive to produce an immediate breakthrough. It can continue applying pressure until individual positions, supply routes and cities become impossible for Ukraine to hold.
Mariupol fell after a devastating siege in 2022. Bakhmut, where Russia suffered tens of thousands of casualties, followed in 2023, and Avdiivka in February 2024. Each loss moved the battlefield further west, removed another defensive or logistical base, and allowed Russia to concentrate on the next.
If Crimea and the areas of Donbas seized before 2022 are included, Russia now occupies almost one-fifth of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. Its recent advances may look small in percentage terms, but Russia measures the war —which was initially supposed to last weeks — in years, not months.
Those advances also have a clear direction. Moscow claims all of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, while complete control of Donbas remains its clearest immediate territorial objective. The remaining Ukrainian-held cities in Donetsk are therefore central to Putin’s recently repeated goal of taking the whole region.
Russia can absorb heavy losses and draw on a larger mobilization pool and military manufacturers to replace personnel and equipment more easily than Ukraine. Only if Ukraine can kill and injure more Russians that the recruitment system can supply, as it did in June and July, will the Kremlin face a manpower crisis.
That may generate another Russian mobilization. Zelenskyy warned on July 27 that Ukrainian intelligence expects Russia to mobilize another 300,000 to 500,000 personnel after September’s State Duma elections.
Whether or not mobilization reaches that scale, Moscow still has the resources to sustain — and potentially expand — the war, drawing on a far larger population, a deeper pool of manpower and a greater capacity than Ukraine to replace personnel and equipment.
None of this means that Ukraine is losing, but it is a sobering reality check. Despite its successes, Ukraine is still fighting a much larger opponent.
At the same time, Ukraine still has many bottlenecks to address, from manpower and air defense to logistics and economic endurance.
It needs a more sustainable military manpower system, predictable supplies of ammunition and air-defense interceptors, stronger protection for logistics infrastructure, and Western support planned for years rather than delivered through repeated emergency packages.
The overall military situation appears better than it has for some time and there is much to cheer. Ukraine is far from beaten and a long way from being forced into a bad peace.
But the Kremlin is measuring this war in years, not months. Unless there is some sudden and unexpected collapse, Ukraine and its partners will need to do the same.
Sofia Slonovska is a CEPA Editorial Intern and a graduate of Bard College Berlin, where she studied politics, economics, and social thought. Ukrainian-born, her research interests include European security, Russia’s war against Ukraine, and transatlantic relations.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-08-01 04:10:13
Russia’s shadow war against NATO allies has moved southwards, with three drone breaches of Romanian airspace in as many days, and a surge of other incursions in recent weeks.
Together with another attack on Poland, where a Russian cruise missile struck 100 km (62 miles) from the country’s eastern border on July 30, the incidents suggest that the Kremlin is once again turning up the dial to menace alliance members in the east.
Romania shot down the three suspected Russian drones on three consecutive days from July 24-26, a first for the NATO member. The Bucharest government’s response signaled a toughening of its reaction to airspace violation, and an unstated recognition that it is being tested by Moscow.
Romanian defense analyst Radu Tudor told this author Russia was “100%” to blame for the incursions. He suggested the firmer government response followed a Russian drone strike on a housing complex in Galați in May, when two people were wounded, and a fire started. “This was probably the trigger for the Romanian and NATO decision makers to engage and down those drones,” Tudor said.
The drones, including at least one Shahed-type used by Russian forces in its war against Ukraine, were shot down across the country; one came within 100 km of the capital.
Drone incursions have significantly intensified this year, with 18 unauthorized entries reported in 2026 alone up to July 26 according to the defense ministry, out of a total of 33 since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
President Nicusor Dan said it was “intolerable for the Russian Federation to continue violating Romania’s airspace.” He added: “Such actions are unacceptable and we are treating them with the utmost seriousness, alongside our allies.”
Last fall saw the most intensive attacks against NATO states, mainly in Northern and Central Europe. These eased somewhat after GRU efforts to shut down the Polish power grid over Christmas, but have never ended. While some incidents may be the result of Russian recklessness, many more are deliberate and follow a pattern, as with the Romanian incursions, last year’s undersea cable cuttings in the Baltic Sea, and drone-induced airport closures.
Romania, which lies on NATO’s eastern flank and on the shores of the Black Sea, shares a 640-km border with Ukraine and is vulnerable to spillover from the war as Russia targets Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.
“Russia has been carrying out these hybrid actions for a very long time in Romania: disinformation campaigns, cyberattacks, drone incursions, attacks on various ships in Romania’s Exclusive Economic Zone. They will certainly intensify,” said retired Romanian Gen. Dorin Toma, adding that Russia is trying to test “Romania’s limits.”
He said Romania and other European states must respond firmly to such provocations and destroy any unidentified aircraft that violate their airspace.
Last year, the Romanian parliament adopted a law allowing the country to shoot down drones breaching its airspace, but Bucharest had been timid in its response until last week. Earlier incursions were tracked but not engaged.
Last year, Romania and Poland, NATO and EU members which border Ukraine, acquired the MEROPS system, which fires short counter-drones to take down incoming unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), following repeated incursions along NATO’s eastern flank.
“The summer Romania shot back,” read one headline in Adevarul reflecting the tougher response.
Romania has already shut down a Russian consulate in Constanta over a previous incursion which injured two, and this week presented Russia’s ambassador to Bucharest with fragments of drones shot down in Romanian airspace. He was summoned to a meeting to protest the incursions, which he called “a set-up”. Romania also expelled a diplomat over the incident
“The Romanian side highlighted that the Russian Federation bears exclusive responsibility for all these grave incidents and for the deterioration of the regional security environment,” the Romanian foreign ministry said in a statement. Romania also recalled its ambassador to Russia for consultations in Bucharest.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has called such incidents “a direct consequence of Russia’s war against Ukraine.”
Last month, a Ukrainian sea drone exploded in the Romanian port of Constanta. The Ukrainian military said it had veered off course as a result of Russian electronic warfare interference, a technique Russia has also been using to menace the Baltic states.
Alison Mutler is a British journalist who has been working in Romania for almost 35 years. She was the Associated Press bureau chief for 25 years and was part of a team that covered the Romanian revolution for the British TV channel ITN. For the past five years, she has worked for the Romanian-English website Universul.net and has been its director for the past three years.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-08-01 04:02:24
“I’m done exploring the world. I don’t mind traveling, but I want to live in Ukraine,” said Oksana, a 25-year-old from southern Ukraine who has lived in Germany since 2022.
She has learned the language, found work, and secured stable housing, yet Germany still doesn’t feel like home. She misses the familiarity of Ukraine and the sense that, as a citizen, she can influence the society around her.
But she says she is not ready to return. Russia’s war is still raging, her home remains occupied, and she wants to pursue a master’s degree at a top university, establish herself professionally, and build a fulfilling life in a free and democratic country.
Her dilemma is part of a much larger problem. Ukraine urgently needs young people to sustain its recovery, economy, and already fragile demographic future, yet it is competing for them as they gain education, legal status, and professional experience in more prosperous and peaceful countries.
Ukraine’s population was already shrinking when Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion. Years of low birth rates, an aging population, and emigration had reduced its population to an estimated 42 million by early 2022. By July 2024, Kyiv said it had fallen to 35.8 million.
The loss of young, educated people is especially damaging. Many had already been seeking better education and careers abroad, but the war, and the legal and learning opportunities offered in response, made those ambitions more attractive and easier to pursue.
Amina, a young Crimean Tatar now working in London, first left Ukraine on an academic exchange after Russia occupied Bucha, where her family was living. She studied in Switzerland and then in Sweden, extending her stay because she found better professors, more imaginative teaching, and a strong international environment. She then completed her master’s at the London School of Economics.
Her story shows how temporary academic mobility can be the beginning of a life abroad. Exposure to better-resourced institutions changes students’ expectations of education and employment and, for many, returning home would feel like sacrificing their professional development.
Amina’s peer Arina, from Kyiv, presents the countercase. She left Ukraine for Romania at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, continued studying online at her Ukrainian university, and returned after several months.
She now lives in Ukraine and does not want to leave permanently, though she hopes to complete a master’s degree abroad because she sees foreign education as more competitive.
After only a short period outside Ukraine, she saw return as the obvious course. Those who complete degrees, enter the labor market, learn the language, and form relationships have a clearer alternative to going back.
Vasyl, a young man from Luhansk, moved to Warsaw for his bachelor’s studies in 2021 and had expected to return, but the full-scale invasion led him to the University of Chicago. He is now preparing for a doctorate in Ukrainian literature in California.
When asked if he could imagine living in Ukraine again, his answer was “likely no,” at least not in the foreseeable future.
After several years in the US, he said he stopped building his life around the war’s end and his eventual return. “It’s more productive to accept things as they are and go from there,” he explained. “It also helps to feel at home here.”
Vasyl’s academic work remains devoted to Ukrainian literature and culture, and he continues to closely follow his country’s politics. He could become a valuable member of the diaspora even if he doesn’t permanently return.
But such influence abroad cannot compensate for the loss of young workers, taxpayers, specialists, and future families.
Under its mid-range scenario, the Kyiv-based Centre for Economic Strategy estimates 68% of refugees aged 18–34 will remain abroad after the war. Emotional attachment may endure, but Ukraine cannot assume it will outweigh the careers, relationships, and stability they find elsewhere.
Kyiv has recognized the demographic danger, and its development strategy through 2040 includes housing support, stronger links with Ukrainians abroad, youth employment, and other measures to encourage returns.
Its recently launched Dodomu platform allows users to create personalized return plans and find information about procedures, employment, education, public services, and Ukrainian communities.
These are important steps, but they mostly help people navigate after their decision is made. They do less to persuade an ambitious graduate that returning is professionally and personally viable.
The interviews with young refugees suggest a key priority should be turning patriotic attachment into concrete professional offers.
Create Ukraine provides a useful model. The program recruits Ukrainians educated or employed abroad and places them in government institutions working on reforms, reconstruction, and European integration. Its current cohort includes 24 professionals across eight state institutions.
But a program measured in dozens cannot address a problem measured in hundreds of thousands.
A national system of paid internships, return fellowships, graduate programs, and targeted recruitment across government, municipalities, universities, reconstruction projects, civil society, and strategically important businesses could help turn the tide.
Candidates could be encouraged with defined positions, adequate compensation, and, where necessary, helped with relocation and housing before leaving employment or education abroad.
When Amina explored an opportunity connected to a Ukrainian institution in London, she found the position was unpaid. For someone who wanted to work for Ukraine, this was immediately discouraging.
And back home, foreign education is often seen as a bureaucratic liability rather than an asset. Ukraine could encourage returns by simplifying the recognition of reputable foreign degrees, while joint degrees, teaching visits, research partnerships, and paid placements could help bring professional experience home.
The problem is not that young people travel to study abroad. Amina emphasized that intercultural exchange had developed her professionally and changed how she understood and communicated Ukraine’s position.
Oksana similarly described becoming more emancipated, adaptable, resilient, and conscious of her identity while living in Germany. Ukraine could benefit from those qualities by creating institutions capable of receiving them.
Above all, Ukraine needs to continue being a country to which these young people want to return.
The interviewees repeatedly mentioned the importance of democratic institutions, the rule of law, European integration, and social inclusion. Sabina, a young woman preparing to begin her master’s at Milan’s Bocconi University, said her decision would depend on continued reform, LGBT protections, social inclusion, and confidence that her taxes would not be stolen.
Vasyl said authoritarian backsliding would repel people who might otherwise return.
It was clear these are not secondary factors to be addressed after economic reconstruction has happened. They are vital to reassure young Ukrainians that, if they return, they will be protected by institutions, treated fairly, and allowed to shape the country around them.
Most already know that their country needs them, so another campaign telling them that is unnecessary.
They need a credible path home, clear opportunities, and a country in which they can imagine building the rest of their lives.
Some interviewees’ names have been changed at their request for privacy or security reasons.
Sofia Slonovska is a CEPA Editorial Intern and a graduate of Bard College Berlin, where she studied politics, economics, and social thought. Ukrainian-born, her research interests include European security, Russia’s war against Ukraine, and transatlantic relations.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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