Core state functions have continued since the full-scale invasion despite infrastructure damage, personnel shortages, and sustained security pressure. Local governments have maintained basic service delivery, and anti-corruption bodies have continued pursuing high-level cases.
But operation under extreme conditions does not automatically translate into institutions capable of delivering the structures needed for peacetime political competition, large-scale reconstruction, or declining external oversight.
The central question is not whether Ukrainian democracy can survive external aggression, but whether wartime resilience can be converted into durable institutional capacity (detailed in a newly published report from CEPA, Ukraine 2036).
The outcome will be determined by policy and legislative decisions taken in the near term, while momentum for reform remains strong and international engagement is concentrated. Delay increases the risk that temporary wartime fixes will become embedded as permanent institutional shortcuts, weakening long-term democratic consolidation.
Ukraine now has a rare window for reform created by crisis conditions that have lowered political barriers to change. Wartime has enabled the exposure of high-level corruption, the restructuring of judicial institutions with international participation, and measurable constraints on the influence of oligarchs.
While these developments demonstrate the state’s capacity to convert crises into momentum for reform, the window is time-limited and will narrow as political and economic conditions normalize.
The priority is to clarify emergency powers and civil-military boundaries, and most urgently the constitutional framework for those powers and the division of authority between central government, regions, and local communities.
Ukraine’s current military administration operates under legal provisions that are dangerously unclear, and the capacity for discretion has led to inconsistency across regions and significant potential for abuse.
The clause allowing the establishment of military administrations has been interpreted so broadly that it undermines legal predictability, and this lack of clarity cannot be allowed to continue in peacetime. If emergency powers remain poorly defined, future leaders would be able to exploit real or created crises to concentrate power and bypass democratic limits.
Constitutional reform must clarify and enforce the roles of different levels of government while closing the legal gaps around emergency governance. This work must start now, before emergency powers become the default in peacetime and before reconstruction-based governance takes over.
Ensuring merit-based judicial appointments, and protection for independent anti-corruption bodies, will determine whether institutional gains can survive the pressures of reconstruction. The full implementation of judicial reforms would mean the establishment of sustainable institutions that can function independently in both normal and emergency situations.
There need to be transparent mechanisms for appointments, with meaningful input from civil society. Ukraine also needs new institutional structures, such as a national administrative court to replace the dissolved Kyiv District Administrative Court, and a judicial system able to withstand both physical and political pressure.
Isolated prosecutions are not enough without systematic changes that prevent new oligarchic structures from emerging. Last year’s attempt to undermine the independence of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, and the successful pushback from civil society and international partners, highlight both the political sensitivity of these institutions and their significance to the country’s democratic future.
Reconstruction will inevitably place heavy demands on the legal system, through disputes over property rights, contract enforcement, and corruption-related liability. If the judiciary lacks capacity, independence, or credibility, recovery will be slowed, investment costs will rise, and opportunities for elite capture will expand.
Because investors price institutional risk into financing decisions, judicial reliability will directly shape reconstruction outcomes. A functioning, independent judiciary is therefore a core condition for reducing risk and enabling sustainable recovery.
Preparations for the first postwar elections, with the capacity to include displaced citizens, will shape Ukraine’s democratic trajectory. The 2020 Electoral Code introduced proportional representation with open regional lists, a system which encourages party development and inclusive competition by promoting program-focused politics.
But the benefits will only accrue if the new system persists through several electoral cycles. There’s a danger postwar pressures may tempt politicians to revert to past arrangements that favored clientelist competition and weak party structures.
Preserving the 2020 system requires more than just legal provisions. It means ensuring internally displaced people can meaningfully participate, electoral infrastructure is rebuilt to support inclusive competition, and parties are incentivized to grow beyond personalities.
Elections under a system encouraging inclusive party-building will strengthen democratic institutions. Excluding displaced voters or a return to majoritarian competition would waste the momentum Ukraine has gained.
International donors and private investors will condition their support — and the cost of it — on institutional credibility, so anti-corruption progress must be secured now, before the temptations of massive capital inflows test political will.
The reforms Kyiv needs to make are time-sensitive and should be advanced before the guns fall silent and large-scale reconstruction begins. And the current alignment of momentum for domestic reform, international conditionality, and crisis-enabled political space represents a limited opportunity for structural institutional change.
Delay would increase the long-term cost and complexity of reform, while ambiguous emergency governance arrangements risk entrenching discretionary decision-making. Limited judicial capacity would also slow dispute resolution and complicate reconstruction.
Electoral frameworks that fail to adequately incorporate displaced populations would weaken postwar political legitimacy. At the same time vulnerable anti-corruption institutions would increase perceived country risk, raising financing costs and discouraging investment.
Ukraine has demonstrated exceptional wartime resilience, but resilience during war does not automatically produce peacetime institutions capable of sustaining the rule of law, pluralistic politics, and investment confidence.
It will be the policy choices made in the near term which will determine whether wartime institutional performance can be translated into durable governance capacity.
Uliana Movchan is an Ax:son Johnson Fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). She has conducted research at leading institutions, including George Washington and Harvard Universities, the University of Toronto, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, and the University of California, San Diego. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University.
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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