Ukraine is moving its green reconstruction from discussions to concrete projects. At a working meeting with Germany’s Federal Ministry for the Environment and the team of the Green Recovery Platform, the Ministry of Community and Territorial Development agreed to start selecting specific pilot projects from the state Unified Project Portfolio for implementation in 2026.
What is being chosen
Officials agreed on a simple rule: only projects that are fully developed, costed, and backed by a clear financial model will get into the pilot pool. After that, each of them must go through a full assessment cycle — environmental, financial, institutional — and only then can be proposed for scaling to the whole country.
This approach should protect the program from “declarative” recovery and focus money on what can actually be built or modernized in the next few years.
Why the Green Recovery Platform matters
The Platform is the joint Ukrainian–German framework that should make recovery not just a replacement of the destroyed, but a transition to cleaner energy, sustainable infrastructure and resource efficiency. At the meeting, the parties confirmed that the Platform will be used as a nationwide tool for solving cross-cutting “green” tasks — from energy efficiency to waste and water systems.
Germany, for its part, will consider supporting the institutional capacity of the Ukrainian ministry — in other words, helping it build a team and procedures that can manage more and more complex green projects.
Priority: PPP, not only budget
The Ukrainian side separately emphasized: when picking pilots, they will look first at those that can be implemented under public-private partnership (PPP). This is important for two reasons:
-
the state budget is overloaded with defense and social spending;
-
recovery needs long money and private technology.
So, if a project from the Unified Portfolio has a PPP model — it will have better chances to be implemented within the Platform.
What’s next
-
the ministry will prepare a shortlist of pilot projects from the Unified Project Portfolio that need financing in 2026;
-
the German side will look for possibilities to support them and help align them with Platform procedures;
-
a workshop will be organized to finalize the criteria of “green” recovery — to make sure projects really reduce emissions, improve resilience, and match EU approaches.
Context
Ukraine already has a very large Unified Project Portfolio — after the last expansion, it includes more than a trillion hryvnias’ worth of recovery and modernization initiatives. But such a portfolio still needs “filters”: donors, especially European ones, want to see ready, counted, green-compliant projects. The current agreement with Germany and the Green Recovery Platform is exactly such a filter — to turn a long list of ideas into a shorter list of real construction sites in 2026.
