This roundtable brings together some of the contributors to a special issue co-edited by Gwendolyn Sasse and Viktoria Sereda and published by the journal Post-Soviet Affairs in 2026. The special issue focuses on the methodologial, ethical and practical challenges involved in social science research on the effects of war on Ukrainian society. The discussion is organised around the following themes: language shifts and minorities; displacement in and from Ukraine; resilience and trauma. Each contributor critically reflects on the scope and limitations of their own methodological choices, the concepts used to frame and contextualise their research, and the ambiguities and open questions remaining with regard to the research questions. Each contributor proposes innovative approaches to address the challenges associated with empirical research on Ukrainian society. Among the proposed strategies are, for example, pursuing different forms of multi-method data collection, innovating on survey questions, conducting panel surveys or longitudinal qualitative studies, and embarking on new interdisciplinary collaborations between social scientists and psychologists/psychiatrists to study the prevalence and socio-political effects of psychological war-related trauma. Taken together, the contributions to this roundtable advance on existing methodological repertoires and contribute to a wider comparative research agenda on documenting and understanding the legacies of war.