Unbroken – the name of Lviv’s new medical Rehabilitation Centre is a sign of defiance. With shiny new wards for robotic prostheses, physical rehabilitation and trauma therapy, sports facilities and a giant white “walkbot” for amputated patients, it stands as a flagship of hope for thousands of Ukrainians mutilated by Russia’s devastating war.
More than 150 severely injured war victims have been evacuated to the centre from frontline hospitals since it opened last April. Some 200 more are on a waiting list. Most have lost legs or arms, many also eyes or hearing, others with severe head wounds, many psychologically traumatised.
“These people are our heroes,” says Bogdan, a young helper, in front of a gallery of photos showing patients with metal prostheses, crouched on crutches or in wheelchairs. Most are soldiers, but some are civilian women and children. “They lost everything, but they are unbroken”.
Thousands more need help. At least 20,000 Ukrainians have lost limbs since Russia’s full-scale invasion, staff at the medical centre estimate. Building work at the complex continues, including a water therapy pool and a house for displaced mothers. The aim is to reach a capacity to treat some 10,000 patients a year.
The name is also a clear signal from the authorities. Coordinated by Lviv’s First Medical Union, Ukraine’s largest health facility and the city administration, the prominent rehabilitation project is also supported by the Ministry of Health in Kyiv. The Ukrainian state, it seems, stands at the helm of the country’s recovery.
Indeed, the gigantic task of reconstructing Ukraine is already in full flow. Streets, houses and schools are being rebuilt in the midst of war and a range of stakeholders have sprung up: urban developers, architects, think tanks, scientists and the media. But above all there is Ukraine's civil society.
Ukraine, unlike Russia, always had a weak state and a strong civil society. The war has shifted the dynamics. The state’s hand has been strengthened and executive power has been centralised. This relationship is a key to the country’s future.
“We are all mobilised together against Putin’s Russia,” said Mykhailyna Skoruk-Shkarivska, the deputy mayor in Bucha when Russian troops invaded, at a recent civil society meeting in Lviv. “We still have to learn solidarity when there is no threat.”
“For the first time, we have a state behind us which is not hostile,” added journalist Natalia Gumenyuk. Now what is needed, according to civil society, is a new social contract to reflect current needs and avoid a backslide to pre-war relations.
As things stand, most projects run locally, in parallel with the state, not with the authorities. There is a general lack of joint working. “Our state is still organised vertically,” noted Otar Dovzhenko of the Lviv Media Forum. “For successful development, we finally have to develop a horizontal line”.
“We don't want to remain a tragic place. We want to become a city of success, a model that can encourage other Ukrainian cities” Mykhailyna Skoruk-Shkarivska, former deputy mayor of Bucha
That will mean the state, private sector and civil society working together, with programmes based on local needs and that focus on people, even before buildings and infrastructure.
Civic groups are fast, flexible and innovative, and will be a key driver in “building back better”, said Inna Pidluska, deputy director of the Renaissance Foundation, which fights for a stronger role for civil society in reconstruction.
“It’s not only civil society. All Ukrainians want to be involved,” Pidluska said. Independent polls show more than 90% of Ukrainians want recovery to be transparent and inclusive of all citizens.
Grassroots groups also have people’s trust and understand local needs and, perhaps most importantly, they are also needed as watchdogs to make planning and allocation of funds more transparent.
At the first International Reconstruction Conference in Lugano, Switzerland, in 2022, Ukrainian civil society issued a manifesto asking for “transparent and participatory“ decision-making processes. At the second meeting in London last June, however, there was still little sign of this. Ukraine’s National Recovery Plan, civil society complains, was drafted without stakeholder consultations. The plan also gives little detail on how to ensure accountability and participation. Civic groups now have their eyes set on the next international recovery meeting, to be held in Berlin in 2024.
A major focus is to make sure Ukraine’s official “green recovery” slogan is more than a government buzzword. Well-known activist and trainer Roman Zinchenko has co-founded Greencubator as a platform to drive sustainable ideas and green entrepreneurship, and fight for what he calls the democratisation of Ukraine’s ill-famed energy sector.
“We need new sustainable solutions down to every village,” Zinchenko stressed. “Our job is to make sure that Ukrainian capitalism becomes as green as possible.”
To that end, the reconstruction of the battered city of Bucha is an example of how not to do it, according to Mykhailyna Skoruk-Shkarivska, the ex- deputy mayor.
“Even the restoration of [Bucha’s] central Vokzalna Street was neither sustainable nor inclusive. There are no bike lanes, no regard for mothers with strollers or the elderly. No one thought to involve citizens,” Skoruk-Shkarivska said.
She has since left the administration and set up her own institute that designs ideas for the city’s future.
She sees Bucha as a new university town and “smart city”, a tech hub just outside the capital. There would also be potential for an attractive rehab and wellness resort if old Soviet-era recreation homes could be repurposed.
“We don't want to remain a tragic place,” Skoruk-Shkarivska declared militantly. “We want to become a city of success, a model that can encourage other Ukrainian cities.”
At the same time, cities like Bucha strive for appropriate ways to memorise the traumatic atrocities and losses of the war. It was in Bucha that photographs of the bodies of up to 500 slaughtered civilians were taken soon after the invasion, spreading through the world press and becoming a symbol of the senseless brutality of Russian troops.
So far, memorialisation is in the hands of local authorities. Civil society pleads for a broader process, involving families of victims, citizens and international experts. “Bucha is an important place for the whole world’s approach to Russia’s invasion,” said Skoruk-Shkarivska, who is studying the 9/11 memorial in New York for inspiration.
Memory is also at the centre of architectural groups working on the reconstruction of the ruined and occupied city of Mariupol. In Lviv, Dutch planner Fulco Treffers, founder of a multidisciplinary Urban Coalition for Ukraine, showed futuristic designs envisioning the rebirth of Mariupol as an ‘Eastern gateway to Europe’.
In the heart of the city, he underlined, most former residents want the ruins of the Mariupol Drama Theatre, bombed by Russian warplanes while thousands of civilians had sought shelter inside, to stay as a memorial.
“People need to be consulted on what form of memory they want,” Fulco stressed. “In the end, though, people will not return because of history, but because it will be awesome to live here.”
Meanwhile, with their city still occupied and flattened to the ground, the project Portraits of Mariupol works to rebuild and honour the personal memories of displaced residents. Collecting pictures and personal accounts, the activists tour the country with a photo exhibition and have started to work on a documentary film.
“Injustice hurts. Justice must be at the heart of our reconstruction”Natalia Gumenyuk
David Pishchev, urban planner and head of Odesa’s Urban Buro Ukraine, proves the spark is igniting in other cities, too, and hopes to make Odesa a modern port city, forming part of the wider “European Waterfront”.
There are some signs of power being shared. Since 2015, Olga Ivanova and her NGO Stabilization Support Services have been fighting for the rights of Ukraine’s internally displaced persons (IDPs). As a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the number has grown to five million people. For years, they had few rights and were poorly integrated. Recently, the government finally decided to create so-called IDP councils. Some 500 joint bodies made up of civil servants, experts and representatives of civil society are to be created in the country to address the refugees' concerns. A step in the right direction that could set a precedent, Ivanova hopes.
Otherwise, many city administrations are inflexible, bureaucratic and conservative, many NGO representatives warned. There is a lack of expertise and personnel on all levels. Generally, local self-government, probably the most popular and successful reform in Ukraine following the 2014 Maidan revolution, has been weakened in the wake of the war. In some liberated areas, communities have been placed under military administration, in others there are only few officials on the ground who have to decide everything on their own.
Another major problem is the lack of transparency in the allocation of reconstruction funds given to city councils by the Ukrainian state’s Fund for the Liquidation of the Consequences of Russian Aggression. But new ways to involve citizens in decision making are being worked on by the private Institute for Legislative Ideas, an independent analytical centre in Ukraine. One such idea would allow people to vote on local renovation projects via the government’s Diia app, which is used by Ukrainians to manage documents digitally.
“It’s about keeping democracy – people must have the right to influence decisions,” Georg Milbradt, German government envoy for Ukraine’s administrative modernisation, said at a rebuilding conference in Berlin recently. “Over-centralisation was a Soviet legacy,” Milbradt stressed. “Recovery cannot mean going back to top-down decisions.”
“More than anything, Ukrainians need justice,” journalist Natalia Gumenyuk said. “Injustice hurts. Justice must be at the heart of our reconstruction.”
