Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, by 2025, damage to Ukrainian infrastructure has reached an estimated US$176 billion, with housing bearing the highest share of the losses (33%) due to missile and drone attacks on civilian cities across Ukraine. Against this backdrop, Ukraine’s rapid emergency response to such strikes has drawn international attention. Emergency services often arrive within minutes, volunteer groups mobilize seemingly spontaneously, and local authorities are visibly present at attack sites. These dynamics have contributed to a widespread portrayal of Ukrainians as an exceptionally resilient society. Yet critical assessments – especially following the January 2026 shelling of Kyiv during the harsh winter – highlight persistent shortcomings: insufficient resources on site, uneven attention to victims’ needs, and weak interagency coordination. This paper takes these empirical tensions as a point of departure to examine the first emergency response in Ukraine from a governance perspective. It asks: What processes, mechanisms, and practices structure the first response to aerial attacks? Which actors perform which functions, and how—if at all—do they coordinate? The paper further investigates whether organizational learning has occurred over time and how prior experience has (or has not) shaped current response patterns. The paper conceptualizes resilience as a system of co-constituted elements activated under conditions of adversity. What becomes analytically central, therefore, is the relation among these elements (people, communities, institutions), which determines whether a system can respond to disruption without losing its basic functionality. Empirically, the study focuses on the first response to Russian aerial attacks in Kyiv in December 2025-February 2026. Methodologically, it draws on a review of national and local public documents outlining formal response algorithms; public accounts by local state and self-government authorities and civil society actors; and in-depth interviews with representatives of the Kyiv Military Administration, Kyiv City Council, district administrations, and volunteer organizations. Through case studies of the two most affected districts, the paper reconstructs the actual algorithms used in the first response. Preliminary findings reveal a notable gap between formally adopted procedures and on-the-ground response practices; an informal yet systematic involvement of volunteer organizations in initial reaction phases alongside emergency services; and significant barriers to institutionalizing accumulated experience. The case illustrates a distinctive model of “resilience governance by default,” characterized by proactive societal engagement that compensates for limited state capacity, but lacking mechanisms to embed this engagement structurally, and limited institutional learning. [with Tetiana Lukeria and Danylo Yashchuk]

One of the most serious social consequences of Russia’s war on Ukraine is the severe crisis in housing that has been inflicted by the massive destruction of housing stock and de facto expropriation by warfare and occupation. Displaced Ukrainians who have been dispossessed of their homes are hit hardest by this disruption. The crisis has fundamentally disrupted Ukraine’s homeownership-based housing regime, established through post-socialist giveaway privatization and characterized by the state’s near-complete withdrawal from housing policy. It has put into question societal expectations of autonomy and security related to owning a dwelling. Considering the high vulnerability of a housing regime built primarily on individual homeownership to large-scale shocks, this paper examines current Ukrainian state, municipal and civil society responses to the housing crisis. Instead of simply cherishing the resilience of Ukrainian society, which risks shifting responsibility onto individuals who have no choice but to be resilient, it focuses on social institutions and actors involved in sustaining this resilience. Accordingly, the paper scrutinises how the various actors involved negotiate individual and collective responsibilities for the housing crisis. Conceptually, it draws from understandings of social and active citizenship. It uses interpretive qualitative methods to analyze current Ukrainian negotiations about housing and compensation for destroyed and dispossessed property. Empirically, the presentation discusses government housing policy as well as housing projects initiated by civil society groups and displaced Ukrainians themselves. These initiatives provide alternatives to homeownership, aiming to transform the existing housing regime towards a system with different tenure options, including social housing. In order to offer more than just ad hoc housing solutions, civil society organizations collaborate closely with municipal institutions. This reinforces the conceptual argument that resilience arises from the cooperation of various actors, not from the actions of autonomous individuals. By exploring the limits of Ukraine's housing regime's resilience in the context of Russia's war of aggression, this contribution emphasizes the essential collective dimension of social resilience. Discussing state and civil society solutions to the housing crisis enhances our understanding of the rationales shaping the agendas of the state, municipalities, and civil society regarding a critical social issue that will substantially affect future societal cohesion in Ukraine.