The European Union has provided Ukraine with a €90 billion (approximately US$105.75 billion) support loan for 2026 to 2027, of which €30 billion will be made available for macro-financial assistance or budget support, delivered through the EU’s Ukraine Facility and designed for recovery and legislative alignment with EU standards.

However, alongside these funds, much like Germany after World War II, Ukraine needs a Marshall Plan-style strategy that explicitly integrates financial aid with industrial-scientific renewal.

As Ukraine has abundant mineral resources, a shift from raw material extraction to integrated dual-use technology value chains must become one of the pillars of its economic renewal.

Ukraine’s renewal needs a future-focused science system
This transition requires the rapid development of domestic chemical and industrial capacity, supported by a modern science system. Ukraine’s science system, however, remains largely shaped by its Soviet legacy, continuing to reward the past rather than investing in the future.

Fragmented science system

Ukraine’s science system is a hybrid of the Soviet system and elements introduced during the political transition in the early 1990s. Ukraine inherited from the Soviet period the division between teaching-orientated universities and research institutes of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU).

Following 1991, ministers from various sectors established sectoral academies of sciences: pedagogical, legal, medical and agricultural.

This provided them with lifelong leadership positions after leaving ministerial office. Research institutes subordinated to various ministries further fragment funding and make it difficult to trace research outputs across the system.

While research institutes outside universities are not unique to Ukraine, the governance and funding models differ substantially from those in EU countries. Ukrainian academies preserve Soviet-style hierarchical governance structures, resulting in excessive administrative overheads. For example, in 2026, €3.2 million was allocated to the Presidium, the governing body of NASU.

The division between universities and research institutes of the NASU is not supported by research performance. Recent evidence shows that the citation impact of research output from NASU and universities is comparable, with universities performing better in the social sciences and humanities.

More importantly, research impact is strongly associated with international collaboration rather than institutional affiliation.

This implies that maintaining a divided system is not justified on performance grounds and that integrating research more fully into universities would not weaken but could potentially strengthen the science system.

Rewarding the past

The system of academic remuneration incentives rewards past achievements, often based on opaque criteria, rather than investing in future-orientated research. From the Soviet period, Ukraine has preserved a rigid hierarchical structure of degrees and titles that provide lifelong payments.

These include two doctoral degrees, scientific titles (associate professor and professor) and honorary scientific titles (corresponding member and academician). During the Soviet period, this hierarchy allowed those loyal to the regime to accumulate financial sums.

These incentives persist today. There are also financial awards granted by the cabinet of ministers and the president, as well as additional payments linked to honorary titles such as “Merited Science and Technology Figure of Ukraine” and “Merited Education Worker”, which form part of a broader system of “Merited” titles across multiple professions.

Moreover, lifetime payments for doctoral degrees to individuals employed outside academia, such as judges, prosecutors, civil servants and military personnel, devalue the PhD degree and lead to a significant misallocation of public funds. Approximately one in five judges in Ukraine holds a doctoral degree, which entitles them to a salary supplement of 15% or 20%.

Research funding and transparency gaps

Although reforms have introduced elements of competitive project-based funding, their impact remains limited. The National Research Foundation of Ukraine (NRFU) accounts for only a small share of total state research funding, at 3.6% in 2026.

Transparency is another major challenge. NRFU publishes annual reports in PDF format, which is not machine-readable and limits data analysis. Despite advances in digitalisation, particularly through the Diia system, there is no comprehensive open database of research funding that would allow systematic tracking of how funding is allocated and how it translates into research outputs.

This limits accountability and weakens the effectiveness of research funding allocation. A similar issue arises with the Ukrainian Research Information System (URIS), which was developed to allocate performance-based research funding and remuneration bonuses via the National System of Researchers incentive.

While URIS is described as formally aligned with EU standards through the implementation of the Common European Research Information Format (CERIF), it relies on a static rather than an active, interoperable, API-based implementation of this standard, as envisaged under EU open science principles.

URIS requires academics to enter data on their research outputs manually rather than enabling automated import from international research databases.

In addition, it does not allow data export via APIs or other machine-readable formats. Ukraine also lacks active implementation of the Research Organisation Registry (ROR), which would enable consistent identification of research organisations and improve tracking of research outputs in international research databases.

As a result, URIS does not enable the kind of transparency, interoperability and analytics that are central to open science in the EU. These technical solutions for research data management are relatively low-cost and do not require significant funding.

Ukraine has introduced a performance-based funding mechanism, but its design raises concerns. In advanced research systems, such as that of Belgium, performance-based funding typically supplements institutional budgets, supporting equipment, mobility and small research grants.

In Ukraine, however, it is directly linked to academic salaries and relies on a broad and heterogeneous set of quantitative indicators that risk encouraging formal compliance and output counting rather than a nuanced, expert-based assessment of research quality and impact.

Towards a future-orientated system

If Ukraine’s science system is to contribute to economic recovery and integration with the EU research and industrial ecosystems, fundamental reforms are needed, drawing on established models of research governance in advanced European systems.

First, research should become a core function of universities, with the integration of academies’ institutes into the higher education system.

Second, the remuneration incentives must shift from rewarding past achievements based on opaque criteria to supporting future-orientated research through competitive, project-based funding.

This implies a single doctoral degree, the abolition of academic, scientific, honorary scientific titles and ‘merited’ titles with lifelong payments, as well as the elimination of salary supplements linked to a doctoral degree.

Academic remuneration should be based on adequate, state-defined salary scales, where any salary supplement linked to a doctoral degree is integrated into base pay rather than paid as a separate bonus, as in countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. A doctoral degree should be a prerequisite for an academic career, including research or professorial tracks.

Third, transparency in funding allocation and research assessment must be ensured through open and interoperable data systems, including a comprehensive research funding database that allows tracing the links between funding and research outputs.

Ukraine’s reconstruction presents a unique opportunity to redesign its science system in line with the EU principles of openness, competition and accountability.

But without structural reform, there is a real risk that EU funds, particularly through the Ukraine Facility, will reinforce existing inefficient post-Soviet institutions rather than dismantling them.

If Ukraine is to move beyond a resource-based model and develop advanced industrial and technological capacities, its science system must also change from one that rewards the past to one that invests in the future.

Myroslava Hladchenko 13 May 2026

Dr Myroslava Hladchenko is a senior researcher at the Centre for R&D Monitoring (ECOOM), an interuniversity consortium with participation of all Flemish universities. In 2023-2025, he was awarded an MSCA4Ukraine fellowship for a project, “Development of research assessment practices that contribute to the development of Ukrainian science, economy and society”, conducted at Leiden University, Belgium.

Quelle: University World News.