Winning the war and preserving Ukraine’s fragile resilience: notes from the URC in Rome

16.07.2025, 12:29 eurointegration.com.ua

It is time to talk about a shift in the format of the Ukraine Recovery Conference (URC).

The 2025 Recovery Conference showed that the event gives insufficient attention to the issues that truly matter for Ukraine.

Read more about what this conference means for Ukraine and what needs to change for it to become more effective in the article by leading expert at the Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting, Oleksandra Betlii: Time for war and reform: why Ukraine must change the format of recovery conferences.

Let’s start with what URC is (or should be) for Ukraine.

It is a key milestone for taking stock, a date by which something "grand" is often rushed through in Ukraine (adopting crucial decisions, laws, etc.) or when important international agreements or memoranda are signed. These include not just intergovernmental deals, but also those involving business and local communities.

It is a symbol of international solidarity in supporting Ukraine.

It is a space for networking, both among international partners and among Ukrainian stakeholders, including businesses and civil society.

It is an opportunity to listen to one another. The URC began as a venue for numerous panel discussions. This year, it also included workshops, trainings and more.

At URC 2025 in Rome, a number of agreements and memoranda were signed.

Both the government and local communities invested serious effort into preparing for the conference and ensuring that documents were signed in one place with partners from various countries. So yes, this kind of conference is clearly important and needed for Ukraine.

The largest sums publicly announced in Rome by the EU were funds that had been earmarked for Ukraine under the Ukraine Facility and ERA instruments. However, both government officials and European partners "forgot" to mention that Ukraine could have received more under the Ukraine Facility programme, had the government and parliament met all the benchmarks in the Ukraine Plan on time, i.e., implemented the necessary reforms.

Although many events took place at the Rome conference, there were fewer opportunities than usual for meaningful dialogue.

Issues related to the implementation of specific reforms were largely avoided in the panel discussions. The conference, whose name until recently still included the word "reform" (it used to be called the Ukraine Reform Conference), ignored key matters such as the appointment of the head of the Bureau of Economic Security. And on the final day, this silence was compounded by news of raids targeting Vitaliy Shabunin.

Unfortunately, the pace and timeliness of fulfilling commitments have indeed slowed down recently, something we’ve highlighted in our monthly monitoring as part of the RRR4U consortium. Often, the challenge isn’t the complexity of the reforms, but the lack of political will to carry them out.

And that is a real problem, because people will return to Ukraine after the war only if it becomes a strong state with transparent rules, resilient institutions and secure property rights.

URC, which began as a reform-oriented conference, should reclaim its role in this area. At the Rome conference, this role was significantly diminished.

Moreover, there’s a need to more substantively discuss not only reforms but also defence.

At the conference, the urgency of military and financial aid, the kind that could help Ukraine win the war, was often lacking.

That’s why I agree with colleagues who argue that the conference should be renamed to shift the narrative. Perhaps it should be called the Ukraine Resilience Conference or even the Ukraine Resilience and Defence Conference?

Because how else can we convey the urgent need to both win the war and preserve Ukraine’s resilience, which today is more fragile than ever.

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