Not just drones. The second Ukrainian innovation that science is recognising

In 2025, the deadliest year yet for civilians, Ukraine’s three largest charitable foundations raised a record 105.9 billion hryvnias. It is more than the years 2022–2024 combined [link 2]. According to the UN, humanitarian aid in Ukraine was delivered by more than 450 organisations, reaching five million people over the course of the year. Civic foundations hold licences to purchase lethal weapons [link 3], which is a function states have monopolised for centuries. These record sums were underwritten by international government grants, which means foreign states now channel billions directly through Ukrainian civic funds, bypassing inter-state channels. It is hard to imagine a stronger institutional trust in civil society.

This is not simply “volunteering.” Alongside the technological innovation that usually gets the attention, Ukraine has grown another kind, a social one. It is harder to measure than, say, the effectiveness of drones, but that doesn’t make it less effective or less in demand.

Broadly speaking, social innovation in Ukraine grows out of a particular capacity of Ukrainian citizens to self-organise into initiative groups and durable structures under sustained external pressure. It emerged in the space left by weak institutions, and it caught the world’s attention precisely when the social fabric of European democracies came under attack itself.

What exactly is innovative here?

First, the speed of trust between strangers. For example, a “jar” or an “envelope” in a banking app, where millions of hryvnias pass to people the donor has never met. In most societies, trust is either personal or institutional. Ukraine has built a networked, reputational trust that works very fast. That is new.

Second, distributed legitimacy. Society took on the functions of the state, and the state ceded them. And it happened without a constitutional crisis, which is rare.

Third, modularity. That means that groups of people can assemble into large structures for a given task and then dissolve again, with no leader and no charter. This is the organisational format of the future.

Fourth, what the women volunteers in my research called the “network of truth.” Volunteers on the front line, supplying the military, become verifiers of reality almost in passing. They developed a stronger immunity to propaganda. And the fight against modern propaganda does need innovation, because the methods of disinformation keep evolving. The “network of truth” holds a great deal of potential.

Fifth, an unusual security actor has appeared in Ukraine: citizens, self-organised into groups, who are neither part of the political elite nor merely the sum of individual volunteers. This phenomenon has been documented by LSE researcher Bohdana Kurylo.

She argues that what Ukrainian citizens are doing leads to a democratisation of security. It leads to a shift from a closed domain run by heads of state and the military to a participatory one, in which organised citizens jointly decide what to protect and how. For Ukrainian civil society, security rests on three dimensions at once: the military capacity to resist, freedom from authoritarian control, and the preservation of cultural identity.

Why does this recognition matter?

Because it deepens how scholarship understands societal resilience. For decades, resilience research moved between two poles. The institutional school held that security is produced by state systems like bureaucracy, law, and coordination. In response, the school of “vernacular security”, which might also be called “folk” or “grassroots” security, proposed looking from below, through the everyday survival strategies of ordinary people.

But that school had a weak spot. Almost all of its research rested on individuals, on how a particular person feels fear, seeks protection, and survives. And if security is always each person’s private feeling, how does anything shared emerge from millions of such feelings? If security becomes that personalised, doesn’t society fragment into separate individuals, each saving only themselves? What was missing were the cases where the view from below was not a sum of loners but a shared action.

The Ukrainian case supplies the answer the school had lacked for some twenty years. It shows that the view from below can be collective, and that personal fear does not necessarily turn a person inward. In Ukraine, it very often becomes the starting point of shared action, because here security from below does not fragment society but organises it.

And this is not an isolated observation. Anton Oleinik, a sociologist and one of the key scholars of Ukrainian volunteering, described it back in 2018 as a “protective belt and a watchdog against corrupt authority”. He traced how the civic and volunteer movement, along with the volunteer battalions, had already appeared in 2014. Ukraine had lived through this experience of self-organisation at the very start of the war in Donbas, and it was that experience that let the country mobilise so quickly in 2022, while international structures responded with a marked delay.

Oksana Pankova showed how the movement matured through digital and networked tools, moving from scattered initiatives to evolved networks that were horizontal rather than hierarchical. And Reznikova and Korniievskyi broke the resilience of wartime Ukrainian society down into its components, so that it could be studied systematically. Different lenses, but the same phenomenon. The society is able to coordinate quickly, without waiting for an order from above.

Europe has noticed. Why now and why its own template may need some upgrades, I will explore in the next column.