Start with the day we all dream about. The long-awaited morning arrives, the shooting stops, tomorrow there is a ceasefire. Enormous joy. And the morning after that comes the hangover, because the bill arrives.
Does Ukraine's financial problem disappear? No. Direct physical damage to the end of 2025 runs to about $195bn, economic losses to roughly $667bn, and recovery over the next decade to that $588bn. So simply putting back what was destroyed is not enough. The task is different: to turn reconstruction into a quantum leap — to build not a copy of the pre-war economy but a new energy, technological and infrastructural system.
One clarification, because the comments confuse this every time. It is not a cheque somebody writes us in a single sum. It is an estimate of total need. Peace is not a free state that arrives automatically after the last shot. Peace has to be financed.
And here the great redistribution of twenty-first-century money begins. If that $600bn arrives as credit, the country risks drowning in debt for generations. Nobody will give the whole sum as one loan. Realistically it will be a mixture: grants, concessional finance, international institutions, risk insurance, private investment, partnerships, possibly mechanisms built on Russian assets. The OECD separates funding from financing for a reason. The structure matters more than the sum.
Foreign capital is not the enemy. Without it Ukraine will not have the money, the technology or the speed; no country has rebuilt itself alone, and we will not be the first. The question is not how to seal everything inside. The question is on what terms capital enters, and what share of the value created stays here.
That is the difference between they built it for us and we built it together.
Infrastructure by itself is not yet wealth. Wealth is determined by who owns the assets and the cash flows they generate.
Rather than invent an answer, let us take two steps back, because history has answered this twice already. Once somebody else's, once our own.
Step one. 1948, Europe in ruins, America launches the Marshall Plan: $13.3bn then, roughly $150–170bn in today's money, seventeen countries. It should not be idealised — it was not charity. The United States rebuilt European economies and simultaneously made itself allies, markets and a barrier against communism. The strength was in that duality: aid that benefits only the recipient exhausts the donor sooner or later.
But two details are rarely noticed. The first: Marshall required the Europeans to formulate their own recovery programme. A country that does not formulate its own economic doctrine inevitably becomes part of somebody else's. The second, and the more important: the question of citizens participating in the capital created simply did not arise then. That is not a reproach, it was a different era, when wealth meant factories, steel and transport. Today data, compute, networks and intellectual property have been added to those. This is exactly where twenty-first-century Ukraine can take the next step.
So a modern Ukrainian plan has to answer more than what will be built. It has to determine in advance who will own the strategic objects, where the patents will stay, who will control the data, where joint companies will be registered, who receives a share of future profit, and what portion of the value created is inherited by the next generation of Ukrainians. Otherwise Ukraine gets new concrete and its old dependence.
Step two. Our own. In the nineties every Ukrainian received a voucher. A share of the country. There, apparently, was the formula for justice. Except that a share you can sell is a share you will sell when there is nothing to live on, and people sold them for kopecks. That is how the ones we spent the following decades calling the masters of life appeared. In many Ukrainian families those certificates are still lying among old documents. I suspect one of mine is somewhere in my parents' papers — a souvenir from the era when people were first promised a share and given no instrument to keep it.
So Ukraine already knows this lesson from its own experience: simply handing out a right to an asset is not enough. It has to be protected from poverty, from manipulation and from forced sale.
Now look at those who learned the lesson. Alaska shows the model of a direct public dividend. Norway shows intergenerational state capital. Ukraine does not need to copy either literally. It needs the principle: a strategic resource must create long-term public value. The countries that made citizens co-owners of their resources won their history. The countries that let their resources be pulled apart lost it.
And this time our resource is not oil. It is energy, data and an experience nobody else on the planet has.
In any normal investment deal, whoever carries the greatest risk demands a share in the result. Ukrainian society has already made its contribution: it pays the taxes, it has lost homes and businesses, it creates the data and the technology, it carries the historic risk. Lives. So why should society participate only in the costs and never in the capitalisation?