KYIV, Ukraine—Long before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Viktor Riabokin was thinking about housing. Riabokin, a Ukrainian entrepreneur and urbanist, saw problems everywhere he looked in his home country: electricity and heating systems that relied heavily on fossil fuels; crumbling apartment blocks that lacked green space and walkability; and a housing crisis wrought by a corrupt, profit-driven real estate market.

When the war began, these issues suddenly seemed to shrink into the background, as millions of people displaced from their homes quickly needed to find a place to live. Over the next four years, the crisis grew more dire, as the war damaged or destroyed more than 10 percent of the country’s housing stock, causing over $60 billion in damage to housing. But Riabokin now feels that Ukraine’s pre- and post-war problems are deeply interconnected. Building housing for displaced people could be a chance to build a more sustainable future for the country as a whole—one powered by renewable energy, with ample parks, and social and affordable housing to support families and injured veterans.

In a cafe in central Kyiv in October, Riabokin excitedly walked Foreign Policy through his vision, which he’s begun pitching to investors and government officials through his NGO, Vid Sertsya Budova (A Building From the Heart). The 39-year-old Riabokin’s urban model is Aristotle’s “polis”—a community that guarantees a good life for its citizens—and he now aims to build one such city on a plot of land about 5 kilometers outside of Kyiv. He believes that if it’s successful, it could serve as a model for the reconstruction of the entire nation.

He’s not alone. As the war in Ukraine progresses into its fifth year, the country is already beginning to rebuild. Much of the east remains occupied by Russia, but cities that have been retaken by Ukrainian forces, such as Kherson, and parts of the Chernihiv, Sumy, and Kharkiv regions, are restoring housing units and municipal buildings, such as schools and hospitals. And a growing group of Ukrainian architects, engineers, and civil society organizations, including Riabokin, is making the case that the country shouldn’t just replace what was there before.

Instead, they’re arguing that the widespread devastation from the war provides an opportunity to reimagine the country’s urban fabric and prepare Ukraine for climate change—what some have called the country’s own version of “build back better.” The realities of rebuilding a country still fighting an active war are threatening some of this nascent progress. The challenge is, “Can we build back greener or shall we build back faster?” said Olena Rybak, managing director at the engineering consulting company iC consulenten Ukraine. “Because in the end, it’s all about money.”

Still, many proponents of this rebuilding strategy see a unique opportunity to steer the country toward a more sustainable path—one that prioritizes the well-being of its citizens for decades to come. “People should understand that generations will be living in our country after them,” Riabokin said. “We are building something big together.”

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Ukraine isn’t the first country in which wartime scarcity has forced builders to think about how to make do with less. During World War II, parts of the United States embraced wind turbines to power their energy grids in the face of shrinking oil reserves.

In the era of climate change, green reconstruction plans that incorporate renewable energy and more eco-friendly building materials have been proposed in countries such as Lebanon and Syria. These designs are part of a larger framework known as “strategic sustainable development,” which posits that by addressing multiple problems at once—environmental destruction caused by war, lack of jobs and housing, the threat of climate change—postwar societies can develop economically and thus prevent future conflicts.

So far, these ideas are stuck in the planning stage nearly everywhere except Ukraine, which has the backing of major donors like the European Union and United Nations. The EU’s €50 billion aid package for Ukraine, which runs from 2024 to 2027, stipulates that at least 20 percent of the funding should go toward “climate change mitigation and adaptation, environmental protection, including biodiversity conservation, and to the green transition.” Annual gatherings like ReBuild Ukraine in Warsaw and the rotating Ukraine Recovery Conference have held dedicated sections focused on green reconstruction.

These initiatives have so far supported hundreds of projects spread across Ukraine, implemented by a patchwork of nonprofit organizations and for-profit companies. Many of them involve reconstructing public buildings, such as schools and hospitals, to incorporate solar panels or heat pumps. Others focus on reducing the climate impact of reconstruction itself, such as by replacing cement—the manufacturing of which is responsible for approximately 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions—with bio-based materials such as straw.

One principle undergirding many of the reconstruction projects is the idea of a “circular economy,” which aims to promote localization and self-sufficiency by reusing and recycling materials within Ukraine, reducing its dependence on outside support as well as its climate impact. Companies such as Neo-Eco, which was founded in France and expanded to Ukraine after the full-scale invasion, have sought to repurpose some of the more than 6.4 million tons of rubble left over from Russian airstrikes.

The process involves separating out usable materials from toxic or dangerous ones, such as asbestos, says Lidiia Shymon, a project manager with Neo-Eco Ukraine. Concrete can be crushed and, with the addition of some water, poured anew, while metal, wood, plastic, and glass can all be melted down or reused in the reconstruction process. Up to 98 percent of debris can be recovered from the landfill, according to Shymon, although so far this level of recycling is just an idea. Ukrainian law currently prohibits building with reused concrete, which can be less stable, a policy that the United Nations Development Programme is working to change.

Even if Ukrainian officials have not yet fully embraced circular economy principles, they are obliged to constantly confront questions of energy security. Russian drones have targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, destroying roughly two-thirds of its energy-generation capacity in just the first three years of war. The bombing of power plants and substations has led to regular blackouts, leaving millions of households without electricity or heating in the middle of winter.

With much of this infrastructure inherited from the Soviet period, proponents argue that this could be Ukraine’s chance to switch to a more decentralized, renewable-powered energy system—one that could not only address climate change, but also more readily resist Russian attacks.

To see what this could look like, I traveled about 45 minutes north of Kyiv to the village of Horenka on a cold but sunny October day. Russian tanks rolled into the town, which had a prewar population of 5,000, in February 2022. By the time the Ukrainian military recaptured the area a few months later, 80 percent of Horenka’s buildings had been destroyed, including its main health clinic. Residents, including an influx of newly injured military veterans, desperately needed medical care but feared that even if the clinic was rebuilt, it would be vulnerable to energy blackouts from future Russian attacks.

The clinic’s director is Olena Yuzvak, a physician who was briefly kidnapped during the Russian invasion and held hostage along with her husband and adult son. Yuzvak exudes a calm determination; almost immediately after her release, and even while she pressed for the return of her family, she began thinking about how to rebuild the clinic in a way that would make it more resilient to future strikes. The solution, she believed, was to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels.

She was able to do so by the following year with the help of Greenpeace, which funded the reconstruction of the clinic and a host of energy upgrades. On the day I visited, Yuzvak and Polina Kolodyazhna, a program leader with Greenpeace Ukraine, showed off the solar panels on its roof, which power heat pumps that keep the clinic running during the summer months. Elsewhere, the local military administration, a centralized body placed in charge of reconstruction after the invasion, has also rebuilt a school and a hospital with improved insulation, making them more energy efficient.

These projects demonstrate that a transition to renewable energy, particularly decentralized sources that don’t rely on a connection to a larger electricity grid, could not only meet Ukraine’s immediate energy needs but also lessen its vulnerability to wartime disruptions, Kolodyazhna said. Although the clinic still needs to pull power from the grid to operate during the winter months when less sunlight is available, it’s self-sufficient for at least six months out of the year.

“When we started this project, people [in the village] were pretty skeptical,” Kolodyazhna told Foreign Policy. “But everything changed after the first power outages. Now, everyone from this village knows that solar can not only be sustainable but also help [them] to survive during shelling.”

So far, a switch to renewable energy is not legally required in the reconstruction process, said Rybak of iC consulenten Ukraine. But many donors, such as the European Union, mandate energy efficiency upgrades, which she said is also part of the process of a green transition. Making sure a municipal building or newly constructed housing for internally displaced persons uses just 10 percent less electricity not only helps reduce carbon emissions but also saves money, Rybak said.

So far, the Ukrainian government backs this idea. The country’s National Energy and Climate Plan calls for doubling the share of electricity generation powered by renewables by 2030, with priority given to small-scale solar, wind, and biomass plants that are harder to target in military strikes. By 2050, the country aims to source 80 percent of its energy from renewables (compared to about 10 percent before the full-scale invasion). As Ukraine advances through the EU accession process, it will also have to align any energy goals with the European Green Deal, which mandates carbon neutrality by mid-century.

“We’re always saying the cheapest energy is the one not used,” Rybak said. “And the saving potential in the country is still so huge.”

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The idea of “green” reconstruction has divided Ukrainian society into two camps: those who believe it’s a necessary step to ensure the country’s future, and those who see it as a distraction from rebuilding as quickly as possible. Some even believe it’s too soon to talk about reconstruction of any kind, said Kateryna Pylypchuk, an entrepreneur and member of the Ukrainian Green Building Council. “Everyone is waiting until the war is over and then we can talk about some kind of planning,” Pylypchyk said.

Even then, it’s not clear what calculations Ukrainian officials will make. Although European Union integration, as well as its own laws, would make turning to fossil fuels to power its own recovery prohibitively difficult, in the short term, Ukraine still sees a major asset in its natural gas reserves, which are currently estimated at 1.1 trillion cubic meters. A Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis found that the country could ramp up gas production as a “bridge” to ensure Europe’s energy security as it pursues its green transition.

Some critics have also warned that this transition risks being financed by international capital to the detriment of ordinary Ukrainian citizens, who may have to pay higher rates for electricity once investors start expecting returns. For example, the same EU regulations that required Ukraine to have a renewable energy plan as part of its integration process also mandated that the state cease energy subsidies, a move that disproportionately affects lower-income Ukrainians.

But the biggest threat is the reality of ongoing war, which continues to affect the very people who are already thinking about how to ensure Ukraine has a sustainable future. When we met in October, Riabokin told me that he hoped to begin construction in 2026. But in January, he was served draft papers and sent to a military training camp. Although he was eventually able to receive an exemption from military service and avoid getting sent to the front lines, the delay threw the precarity of his project into sharp relief—as well as its importance.

“We’ve discovered with our own eyes all the horror of war, all the uncertainty of people that migrated from occupied areas of the country,” Riabokin told me. It is, he said, “just logical to start working on solutions.”