There is a temptation, when a country under invasion keeps doing impossible things, to call it a national character. The Ukrainians are resourceful, we say, as if resourcefulness were a temperament that some peoples are born with and others lack. It is a flattering explanation, and it is the wrong one, because it removes from the story the one part that can be learned.

Ukraine is not resourceful because Ukrainians are a certain kind of people. Ukraine is resourceful because it was given no alternative, and the resourcefulness is the shape that this particular necessity took. When the penalty for failing is national extinction, a society reorganizes itself around not failing, and the inventiveness that follows is not a miracle. It is a method, improvised under load, and it is worth describing plainly because the mechanism is transferable and the sentiment is not.

A country out-inventing a larger one

Start with the asymmetry. Russia began the full-scale invasion with more of almost everything that a conventional war is usually measured in: more men, more shells, more aircraft, more ships, and a defense industry that predates the war by a century. The expectation, in February 2022, was that this arithmetic would decide the outcome quickly. It did not decide it quickly, and part of the reason is that Ukraine refused to fight the war the arithmetic described.

Consider the Black Sea. Ukraine lost almost its entire navy in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, and scuttled its only remaining frigate in the first days of the 2022 invasion. It had no fleet worth the name. The Russian Black Sea Fleet, by contrast, was the dominant naval force in the region, based at Sevastopol, and it began the war doing what dominant fleets do: blockading ports, launching cruise missiles, and dictating what could move on the water.

By the spring of 2024, the picture had inverted. A secretive unit of Ukraine’s military intelligence, Group 13, had sunk five Russian vessels and damaged others using a weapon Russia had not built and had not expected to be decisive: an unmanned surface boat, roughly six meters long, made of plastic, carrying up to 250 kilograms of explosives, capable of a range of some 800 kilometers (BBC; The New Voice of Ukraine). The Magura V5, named for a Slavic goddess of war, is almost invisible to radar and thermal cameras and can be steered from anywhere with an internet connection. It does not need a crew, so losing one costs money rather than lives. The fleet withdrew from Sevastopol and moved east to Novorossiysk, and Russian warships began to limit how far and how long they ventured from port.

The commander of the unit, who goes by the call sign Thirteenth, described a drone that improves after every mission until the earliest prototypes and the current ones are almost different machines. That is the point. The weapon that pushed a fleet out of its home port was not designed in a decade-long procurement program. It was iterated into existence between missions.

The scale of the improvisation

The sea drones are the memorable example. The air drones are the consequential one, because of the number.

In 2022, Ukrainian companies produced about 1,200 drones. In 2023, the figure rose to roughly 415,000. In 2024, it reached 1.7 million, and the state’s own projection for 2025 was a capacity of more than 8 million units (Interfax-Ukraine). A sector that barely existed became, by unit volume, one of the largest in the world.

The institutional design behind that growth matters more than the total. A pilot procurement project, launched under a March 2023 cabinet resolution, let the state buy from domestic producers through simplified and faster procedures, and the arrangement was made permanent in law in December 2024 (Interfax-Ukraine). The government opened a platform, Brave1, to move developers from idea to battlefield, and it is run by people who treat the deployment cycle as the product. One of its architects, Nataliia Kushnerska, describes the shift from 7 manufacturing companies at the start of the invasion to more than 500 companies with more than 1,000 developments, and notes that more than 200 designs have been codified to NATO standards (Brave1). That codification is what lets a workshop product be purchased at scale.

None of that would have happened without the war. All of it would have happened more slowly, or not at all, in a country choosing its projects in a budget cycle rather than a war one.

Keeping the country moving

The most quietly stubborn achievement is the railway.

Ukraine’s rail network carries more than 63 percent of the country’s freight and 37 percent of its passenger traffic (The Independent). With commercial aviation closed, the train is how grain reaches ports, how the wounded reach hospitals, how diplomats reach Kyiv, and how military aid reaches the front. It is a single integrated system, state-owned, and Russia has spent the last two years trying to break it with drones and missiles aimed specifically at locomotives, junctions, and substations.

In March 2025, a sophisticated cyberattack took down the railway’s ticket systems. The company’s response, according to its own account, was eighty-nine hours of continuous work by its information technology staff, who slept two hours a day and returned to the task. Through the outage, ninety-six percent of trains still arrived on time (Kyiv Independent).

That is the pattern, and the chief executive of the railway stated it as policy rather than aspiration: “Lastly, we always have Plan B, C and D. The goal is never to cancel a single service or destination. If a train can’t run, we combine trains and buses” (BBC). The system assumes that any given route will fail and prepares several ways for it not to matter. When a missile destroyed twelve meters of track in Kyiv, crews restored traffic in half a day, the repair team leader said (The Independent).

Heat and light as a war aim

The winter campaign against the grid is where the stakes become existential in the most literal sense, because a country whose power is destroyed is a country whose people cannot stay.

Russia’s attacks have occupied, damaged, or destroyed nearly two-thirds of Ukraine’s dispatchable power capacity since 2022, by the International Energy Agency’s accounting (IEA). One winter brought attacks concentrated on major cities with the evident intention of producing a humanitarian crisis, and at their worst the outages across Ukrainian regions averaged nearly twelve hours a day (Green Deal Ukraina).

The answer has been two-fold, and both halves are characteristic. The first is repair, pursued with a speed that treats restoration time as the real battlefield. The second is dispersal: instead of rebuilding a small number of large plants that a single strike can remove, Ukraine has moved toward distributed generation, solar and batteries and small gas turbines, so that the loss of any one node is survivable (IEA).

The most human expression of the same logic is the network of shelters the government calls “Points of Invincibility,” a deliberately defiant name. Each provides heat, water, electricity, mobile signal, and a place to rest during a blackout. They operate around the clock and are supplied with generators, autonomous heating, satellite internet, and drinking water (Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine). By January 2026, more than ten thousand were in operation (Ukrinform). During that winter’s blackouts, a worker at a Kyiv shelter described the inversion the whole war has produced: “Kyiv residents once supported the military. Now the military is supporting the residents” (TVP World).

The economy refuses to die

The grain corridor is the clearest case of a society deciding that a blockade is a problem to be solved rather than a condition to be accepted.

In July 2023, Russia withdrew from the United Nations and Turkey-brokered agreement that had allowed Ukrainian grain to reach world markets, and then attacked the ports of Odesa. Ukraine’s agricultural exports collapsed. The economy had already lost about 30 percent of its output in the first year of the war, and the ports were the artery through which Ukrainian agriculture, more than 40 percent of the country’s exports before the invasion, reached the world (The Globe and Mail).

Ukraine’s response was to open a corridor of its own, plotted along the territorial waters of Romania and Bulgaria, both NATO members, using sea-depth charts to keep deep-draught vessels clear of shallows, and protected by the same naval campaign that had pushed the Russian fleet eastward. As a correspondent for El País put it, the commercial resilience and investment of Ukrainian companies were essential, but “the turning point for the reconquest of Black Sea trade was undoubtedly the expulsion of the Russian fleet” (El País). By February 2024, cargo volumes from Ukraine’s deep-water ports were running at about two-thirds of their pre-invasion levels (The Globe and Mail).

The part that is not the state

It is tempting to tell this as a story about government. It is not, or not only.

When the war began, Ukraine’s civil society mobilized at a scale that the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London calls, quoting Chatham House, a whole-of-society model of defence: more than a hundred thousand people from civilian professions joining territorial defense units in the first month alone, alongside volunteers, community leaders, philanthropists, and businesses. That same infrastructure has turned to recovery. In the institute’s framing, “Citizens are not just the beneficiaries who arrive once the cranes have gone; they are the load-bearing infrastructure of Ukraine’s reconstruction” (UCL Institute for Global Prosperity).

The examples are small and they are the point. One volunteer organization, Dobrobat, reports 50,000 volunteers from 28 countries restoring homes, schools, and hospitals (Kyiv Post). Another runs one-day community clean-ups, a Ukrainian tradition called a toloka, and has used them to draw young people into repairing the places they live (Rubryka). When a fundraising foundation asked the public for money to buy attack drones in 2022, it raised more than nine million dollars in a single day, and Prytula’s foundation has raised tens of millions of dollars in mostly private donations since the invasion began (Atlantic Council). After the government opened a fundraising platform, its “Army of Drones” campaign let ordinary people and foreigners buy the machines directly (United24).

A state can procure. It cannot generate that. What produces it is a population that has concluded, collectively and without being told, that the country is worth the effort because the alternative is its disappearance.

What this does not mean

There is a version of this essay that would be dishonest, and it is worth naming so that this one does not become it.

Resourcefulness under existential pressure is not a victory, and it should not be romanticized into one. It is expensive. It burns people. The railway has lost more than 800 workers killed in the war (Kyiv Independent). Families are dispersed across borders. The improvisation is improvised, which means it is uneven, incomplete, and paid for in lives rather than in budget lines.

Nor is it a permanent condition. A country that learns to invent under fire does not automatically become a country that invents in peace, and the skill that wins a defensive war is not the same skill that rebuilds after one. The Ukrainian Defense Intelligence commander of sea-drone operations was candid that the dramatic early strikes have given way to a plateau, because the enemy adapted: “Today, we’ve likely reached a plateau,” he said. “We are effectively limiting the enemy’s movements, but those dramatic, high-profile strikes we saw earlier haven’t happened for quite some time” (AP News).

That is the honest shape of it. Resourcefulness is not a gift that keeps giving. It is a response to pressure, and it runs as long as the pressure does.

The lesson worth keeping

So what is actually transferable here, if the temperament is not?

The first thing is the willingness to change the subject of the question. Ukraine could not win the war the arithmetic described, so it changed what the war was about: cheap machines against expensive ones, unmanned platforms against crews, distributed power against centralized plants, several routes instead of one. In each case the shift was not clever for its own sake. It was the recognition that the terms on which you are losing are negotiable, and that refusing them is itself a strategy.

The second is speed as a value in its own right. A weapon that improves between missions, a procurement rule rewritten so that a workshop can sell to the army, a repair crew that restores track in half a day: each is an instance of a society deciding that the interval between a problem and its answer is the thing to minimize. Large organizations almost never measure that interval, which is why they rarely reduce it.

The third is that the capacity to invent, at scale, lives in the whole society rather than in its institutions. The state’s role in Ukraine has been to remove obstacles and to buy, quickly, from whoever solves the problem. The invention itself came from engineers, volunteers, workers, and ordinary people who decided that the survival of the country was their own project. A government that treats its citizens as beneficiaries will get beneficiaries. One that treats them as the load-bearing structure gets a country that holds.

None of this began as a philosophy. It began as the plain, unromantic arithmetic of not ceasing to exist. That is the whole point, and it is why the word for it should be imperative rather than spirit. A country does not invent because it is full of remarkable people. It invents because it has understood, past the point of argument, that it must, and the remarkable is what ordinary people produce once they stop expecting to be saved.

That understanding is the only thing on the list that cannot be donated, and it is the only thing that has to be earned.

Sources

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman