Development Aid will be Critical to Securing Ukraine

The pivot towards rearmament across NATO has seen a collapse in global Official Development Assistance. Along with the US’s disestablishment of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), humanitarian and development programmes around the world are facing a funding crisis. Yet while the collapse in government charity has not been mourned by electorates, it has significant security implications, not least for the future of Ukraine.

Beyond a Ceasefire

The war in Ukraine is far from won, and continuing to arm Ukraine’s military must be the priority. Fighting Russia into a ceasefire, however, while a prerequisite for a lasting peace, is insufficient to secure it. In the event of a ceasefire, Ukraine will face a cascade of economic and political challenges. It will have to work out how to hold elections equitably with more of its territories occupied and a large part of its population displaced abroad.

More ominously, Russia has diminished Ukrainian exports of grain by 75% compared with 2025 through attacks on shipping, while other industries have shrunk owing to limited availability of power, and attacks on storage and distribution infrastructure. Many Ukrainians have moved abroad to find work. Rebuilding that infrastructure will demand investment, and investment risks being deterred by the threat of a breakdown in a ceasefire and the renewal of Russian aggression.

To gain foreign direct investment, Ukraine will have to balance maintaining a large standing army to deter renewed Russian aggression with the demand from its exhausted soldiers to demobilise and reunite with their families. That will pose the challenge of reintegrating large numbers of wounded and disabled personnel into the workforce.

The extant model of Europe underwriting the Ukrainian government’s salaries and pensions budgets will not remain politically sustainable beyond the war. While European militaries may help to deter Russia, the foundation of Ukraine’s capacity to deter will lie in its economic recovery and thus the financial capacity to retain a force in being.

An Investment in European Security

For Europe, the prospect of Ukraine remaining militarily capable, and politically and economically stable, offers a path towards sustainable deterrence against broader Russian aggression. Russia is likely to have misgivings about attacking NATO with an independent Ukraine in position to reclaim the occupied territories on its flank. A weak Ukraine, by contrast, would give the Kremlin the freedom to focus its attention elsewhere. Investment in Ukraine’s future, therefore, is an investment in European security.

Investing in Ukraine’s future, however, is not something that defence establishments have the expertise or authorities to properly undertake alone. Nor can the private sector be counted on without a strong signal of commitment from governments. Development aid, taking a long-term view, is critical to securing European security.

A New Model for Aid

The model of international charity pioneered by the UK’s Department for International Development and USAID is not coming back. It lost public support, in part because serious criticisms went unanswered: that programmes sustained dependency rather than resolving it, that they were rarely designed to build enduring political relationships, and that they relied on an implementing industry whose costs were not always matched by demonstrable results. Fixing a spending target on foreign aid of 0.7% of gross national income risked incentivising finding projects to fund, irrespective of their efficacy.

But the challenges approaching in Ukraine’s future prove the utility of being able to fund multiyear development projects as part of a long-term cross-government strategy. Planning to exploit a ceasefire if it can be achieved offers the promise to design an approach to international development that more closely advances the national interest, and in doing so secures the democratic support necessary to survive amid budgetary pressures.

Perhaps most importantly, it speaks to the need for a coherent strategy that can move budgetary allocations between hard and soft security projects. Such an approach to integrated campaigning has long been advocated in security reviews, but has been difficult to implement in practice. Departmental rivalries have been one issue, but so too have the in-year settlements that risk gearing interdepartmental funds to a process of political prioritisation that too often reacts to rather than anticipating crisis. Thus, programmes risk being cut at short notice as resource becomes demanded at the next flashpoint on ministers’ desks.

Doing things differently will require imagination. Aid is conventionally held at arm’s length from donor interests. In Ukraine, that separation will be hard to sustain: a recovery economy with lower costs and a lighter regulatory burden could come to compete directly with European producers, using cheap labour and limited regulation to undercut European industry. If this occurs, Europe is likely to use regulation to freeze Ukrainian business out of its market. Avoiding this requires baking in economic collaboration and mutually beneficial and dependent projects between Ukrainian and European industry.

Ukraine is not the only context in which there is a strong complementarity between aid and security, or even prosperity. Making the case to embark upon such projects, however, requires a much better articulation of the return on investment such spending can deliver for the taxpayer. The question is who shall make that case? While Ukraine has held ‘reconstruction’ conferences, they remain largely disconnected from planning over sustaining Ukraine’s defence. It is time these two conversations become aligned, so that beyond a strategy to win the war, there is a maturing strategy to secure the peace.

© RUSI, 2026.

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