UkraineAlert

UkraineAlert

UkraineAlert is a comprehensive online publication that provides regular news and analysis on developments in Ukraine’s politics, economy, civil society, and culture. UkraineAlert sources analysis and commentary from a wide-array of thought-leaders, politicians, experts, and activists from Ukraine and the global community. UkraineAlert has become a major publication in Ukraine’s news landscape and has established itself not only through its quality of content but also significant partnerships with English, Ukrainian, and Russian-language media through the country.

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As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.


editor’s picks

Winning Energy Battle Just as Important as Fight in Eastern Ukraine

UkraineAlert
Sep 3, 2026

Putin cannot defeat NATO but he could divide and discredit the alliance

By
Peter Dickinson

If Russian President Vladimir Putin decides to attack NATO, his goal will be to divide and discredit the alliance rather than actually defeating it, writes Peter Dickinson.

Conflict
Defense Policy

Winning Energy Battle Just as Important as Fight in Eastern Ukraine

UkraineAlert
Aug 27, 2026

Ukrainians are not superheroes with endless powers of resilience

By
Lauren Van Metre, Elena Davlikanova

By celebrating Ukrainian resilience as an almost superhuman quality, the international community risks obscuring the much less glamorous reality that Ukrainians are actually ordinary people who have endured extraordinary violence for far too long, write Lauren Van Metre and Elena Davlikanova.

Civil Society
Conflict

Winning Energy Battle Just as Important as Fight in Eastern Ukraine

UkraineAlert
Aug 25, 2026

A cultural renaissance is reshaping national identity in wartime Ukraine

By
Davis Richardson

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is fueling a defiant cultural outpouring that is redefining and strengthening Ukrainian national identity in ways that challenge centuries of Kremlin imperialism, writes Davis Richardson.

Civil Society
Conflict

Latest analysis

UkraineAlert

Apr 24, 2019

How history will judge Poroshenko

By
Alexander J. Motyl

The majority of Ukraine’s voters and pundits detest President Petro Poroshenko who lost his chance at a second term on April 21. However, history will prove them wrong and judge him as Ukraine’s most successful leader. Indeed, Poroshenko will go down in the annals as the man who consolidated Ukraine’s state, nation, democracy, and the […]


Democratic Transitions

Elections


UkraineAlert

Apr 23, 2019

Why Poroshenko lost

By
Dennis Soltys

On April 21, television star Volodymyr Zelenskiy crushed incumbent president Petro Poroshenko in the second round of Ukraine’s presidential election. Even though Zelenskiy has never held elected office, voters were so tired of corruption and economic stagnation that they were willing to take a risk. Zelenskiy ran an unusual campaign. He made few programmatic promises […]


Democratic Transitions

Elections


UkraineAlert

Apr 23, 2019

Transition challenges for an outsider president

By
Adrian Karatnycky

Volodymyr Zelenskiy, elected to Ukraine’s presidency Sunday in a landslide, may be one of the least prepared leaders to head a democracy in world history. Not only is he an outsider, whose main experience of politics has been to play a president in a satirical television program, he has done little to prepare for the job. […]


Democratic Transitions

Elections


UkraineAlert

Apr 18, 2019

How the west helped put a comedian in reach of Ukraine’s presidency

By
Mary Mycio

With polls putting Ukraine’s incumbent president Petro Poroshenko far behind TV actor Volodymyr Zelenskiy ahead of Sunday’s run-off election, it is worth considering how the West helped put this secretive comedian, backed by oligarchs, on the cusp of becoming commander-in-chief of a country at war with the Kremlin. A case in point occurred in February, […]


Conflict

Elections


UkraineAlert

Apr 18, 2019

Don’t believe the hype. Presidential elections aren’t what matters in Ukraine

By
Melinda Haring

There’s election fever in Kyiv, and with less than a week before Ukrainians go to the polls to likely elect an inexperienced comedian as their next president, the outcome is all but certain. Volodymyr Zelenskiy should easily defeat incumbent President Petro Poroshenko on April 21.      The far more interesting question is who will […]


Democratic Transitions

Elections


UkraineAlert

Apr 17, 2019

What does it mean to be Ukrainian today?

By
Bohdan Nahaylo

The day of judgement in the Ukrainian presidential election is almost upon us. This is not just a contest between two political contenders and their supporters, representing different backgrounds, styles, and constituencies, or even visions, but something more fundamental. It is a clash between the old and the new. Between traditional Ukraine, in the political […]


Defense Policy

Elections


UkraineAlert

Apr 16, 2019

Three predictions for Ukraine’s presidential run-off

By
Brian Mefford

Voters knew the first round of Ukraine’s presidential election on March 31 was a freebie, but they will make their vote count in the run-off on April 21. It was clear to the public that there would be no candidate who would receive 50 percent in round one, so Ukrainians were able to vote their […]


Elections

Ukraine


UkraineAlert

Apr 16, 2019

Is Zelenskiy really the Kremlin’s best hope in Ukraine?

By
Peter Dickinson

In the first round of Ukraine’s presidential election, the leading pro-Russian candidate secured 11 percent of the vote. Compare this to 2010 when pro-Kremlin candidate Viktor Yanukovych received 49 percent. This dramatic decline reflects the scale of the damage done to Russian interests in Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s ongoing war. Russian aggression has alienated millions […]


Conflict

Elections


UkraineAlert

Apr 9, 2019

Will the elections give the Ukrainian economy the kick It needs?

By
Anders Åslund

Between the two rounds of the presidential election, a strange calm has grasped Kyiv. The election billboards are gone, and so are the many local protests. The only drama takes place on the Internet, where the two remaining candidates duel with videos. This is a propitious moment to take the temperature of the Ukrainian economy. […]


Democratic Transitions

Elections


UkraineAlert

Apr 8, 2019

Ukrainians are world champions at coping with crisis

By
Peter Dickinson

The ability to recover from national crises is plugged into Ukraine’s DNA.


Democratic Transitions

Elections

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spotlight

Resilience in the face of adversity

Ukraine’s transformation

Ukraine has moved tentatively toward an open society and market economy since independence. The country has held several democratic elections and made halting progress in addressing corruption and state control in its economy. Since the 2014 Maidan Revolution, Ukraine has undertaken significant governance and economic reform and moved decisively toward a Europe-Atlantic foreign policy. Since 2022, Ukraine has resiliently continued to advance some reforms despite fighting for its very existence against the full-scale Russian invasion.

Learn more about Ukraine

Winning Energy Battle Just as Important as Fight in Eastern Ukraine

UkraineAlert
Dec 5, 2024

Ukraine’s entrepreneurial class can drive the country’s economic recovery

The Ukrainian SME sector has demonstrated remarkable wartime resilience and is poised to be at the forefront of efforts to create a modern, innovative, postwar economy, writes Anton Waschuk.

Read More

Winning Energy Battle Just as Important as Fight in Eastern Ukraine

UkraineAlert
Oct 1, 2024

Ukraine needs international investors to maintain defense tech momentum

By
Mykhailo Fedorov

Ukraine’s rapidly expanding defense tech sector can play a game-changing role in the war against Russia but Ukrainian companies need international investment, writes Ukraine’s Minister for Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov.

Artificial Intelligence
Conflict

Winning Energy Battle Just as Important as Fight in Eastern Ukraine

UkraineAlert
Jun 13, 2024

Ukraine officially embraces English as historic westward pivot continues

By
Oleksiy Goncharenko

By officially embracing English, Ukrainians aim to support their country’s historic pivot away from Moscow and return to the European community of nations, writes Oleksiy Goncharenko.

Civil Society
Conflict

The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

The Eurasia Center’s mission is to enhance transatlantic cooperation in promoting stability, democratic values, and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe and Turkey in the West to the Caucasus, Russia, and Central Asia in the East.

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Content

UkraineAlert

Nov 16, 2015

Winning Energy Battle Just as Important as Fight in Eastern Ukraine

By Andrian Prokip

The West has focused on Ukraine’s two existential crises: the war in the east and Ukraine’s troubled economy. It’s understandable, but now is the time for Ukraine to press hard on energy reform because Russia uses energy to exert influence over Ukraine and the energy sector has been a black hole of corruption in the […]

Ukraine

UkraineAlert

Nov 16, 2015

Slowly But Surely Kyiv Comes Around

By Alexander Motyl

How has Ukraine changed since the Euromaidan Revolution? In attempting to answer this question, I’ve used the governance-related categories in Freedom House’s Nations in Transit study, which tracks the reform record of post-Communist countries in Europe and Eurasia, and supplemented them with a few of my own. (Full disclosure: I’ve been involved in the Nations […]

Ukraine

UkraineAlert

Nov 11, 2015

Will Saakashvili’s Defeat in Odesa Be His Ukrainian Waterloo?

By Brian Mefford

Odesa Mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov trounced Solidarity Party’s Sasha Borovik by 53-26 percent in Ukraine’s local elections October 25. Observers reported carousel voting, multiple voting lists, exit poll workers agitating for candidates, and a suspiciously slow vote count. The race for Odesa mayor was a proxy war between Oblast Governor Mikheil Saakashvili and oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, […]

Ukraine

UkraineAlert

Nov 11, 2015

A Close (and Surprisingly Positive) Encounter with Odesa’s New Police

By Vladislav Davidzon

The reorganization and reform of Ukraine’s catastrophically corrupt police force was the top priority when President Petro Poroshenko appointed Eka Zguladze first deputy Interior Minister of Ukraine. Poroshenko wants to emulate the relative success that Georgia’s Rose Revolution reformers garnered in modernizing their small post-Soviet country. Zguladze is just one of the many Georgians who […]

The Caucasus Ukraine

UkraineAlert

Nov 11, 2015

Failing on the Ukrainian Battlefield, Russia Turns to Terrorism

By Aaron Korewa

To understand how Russia conducts its foreign policy, simply look at what the Kremlin accuses everyone else of doing. Unlike the Soviet Union, which operated under a coherent ideology, the Russian government under President Vladimir Putin seems to believe that everybody is a cynical power player, and that the West is simply hypocritical about it. […]

Russia Ukraine

UkraineAlert

Nov 10, 2015

Judiciary Reforms Take a Major Step Forward in Ukraine

By Joshua Solomon

As conflict flares up on Ukraine’s eastern front, a different campaign rages in the conference rooms of Kyiv. The administration of President Petro Poroshenko is overhauling the Ukrainian state, amending everything from the constitution to the tax code. The most important reform may be the creation of an independent judiciary. As Anders Åslund pointed out this […]

Ukraine

UkraineAlert

Nov 10, 2015

Expert Panel Identifies Ways to Defeat Corruption in Ukraine

By Larry Luxner

A top Citibank executive and one of Ukraine’s most popular rock stars were among five luminaries who offered their suggestions Monday for cleaning up the endemic corruption that has long strangled the Ukrainian economy and kept foreign investors away. The five appeared on a November 9 panel titled “Securing Ukraine’s Future: Winning the Fight Against […]

Ukraine

UkraineAlert

Nov 9, 2015

Ukraine Needs Responsible Public Finances Now

By Anders Åslund

With increasing surprise, I follow the Ukrainian discussion about public finances. Strangely, some prominent Ukrainians seem to think that taxes and public expenditures have no relationship to one another, arguing that public expenditures should be increased and taxes should be cut. But that is called populism, the disease Ukraine has suffered from since its independence […]

Russia Ukraine

UkraineAlert

Nov 9, 2015

Justice Sector Is Central Battlefield in Struggle Between Old Ukraine and New Ukraine

By Geoffrey R. Pyatt

Editor’s note: US Ambassador Geoffrey R. Pyatt gave remarks at the “Conference on Legal and Governance Reform,” sponsored by the US-Ukraine Business Council and Kyiv School of Economics on October 30, 2015 in Kyiv. Pyatt’s remarks have been shortened below. The full version is available here. What a difference a year makes. When we gathered […]

Russia Ukraine

UkraineAlert

Nov 9, 2015

Putin’s Victories in Syria

By Stephen Blank

To the great British military analyst Basil Liddell-Hart, it was axiomatic that the purpose of war was a better peace. In other words, for military operations to be successful, they must be correlated with political outcomes and strategic gains. Unfortunately, the idea that the United States can successfully employ military power to achieve clear political […]

Russia Ukraine
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