August 28, 2026: Post-war Ukraine is shaping up to be one of the largest national reconstruction projects since the Soviet Union's post-war effort in the 1950s. Back then, Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, and the reconstruction left it as a center for developing new technologies and building essential equipment like gas turbines and much more. Ukraine also provided much of the Soviet farm income.

Ukraine estimates that reconstruction will cost about $750 billion. Ukraine is planning to rebuild its housing, businesses, roads, rail lines, and infrastructure after five years of fighting. Several hundred thousand homes or apartments were destroyed, along with over a thousand schools and over 50,000 kilometers of roads, with similar damage to rail lines; all the hydroelectric power plants were damaged or destroyed.

Last year, NATO nations promised substantial post-war economic rebuilding aid so Ukraine can fit it into its war plans. For example, the Netherlands, one of the smaller NATO members, announced it was spending several billion dollars on Ukraine aid in 2024 and 2025. Germany's GDP is over four trillion dollars, while the Netherlands' is about one trillion dollars. Germany sent $8 billion in military aid to Ukraine in 2024. Considering its smaller size, the Netherlands has been a major supplier of aid to Ukraine. The Netherlands and Germany plan to provide even larger amounts of aid for the post-war reconstruction.

Dutch aid to Ukraine in 2024 includes a wide array of weapons and services. There will be more air defense systems, UAVs and munitions for various weapons Ukraine already has. Services include training for Ukrainian F-16 pilots and aircraft maintainers. In 2024, a larger portion of the aid was for economic reconstruction and current government financing. Unable to do sufficient damage to Ukrainian armed forces, Russia has been concentrating many of its missile attacks on economic targets. These have to be repaired or rebuilt, especially the targets that provide electricity, heat or clean water and sanitation services. The Russians wanted Ukrainian civilians to suffer when winter arrived. The Dutch can relate to this. During World War 2, German troops occupied the Netherlands, and toward the end of the war, the Germans greatly reduced the food available to Dutch civilians. In the Netherlands, that period of privation is remembered, and they don’t want to see it happen again and again to the Ukrainians.

For centuries, Ukraine has suffered periods of brutal occupation by invaders. The most frequent brutal occupier has been Russia, which has played the homicidal villain several times in the last century. The most infamous Russian occupation incident was the use of famine during 1932 and 1933 to suppress Ukrainian opposition to Russian rule, especially the new Russian ideology of communism, which prohibited private farms and expected all farmers to work for state-owned farms. Many farmers resisted this throughout Russia, but opposition was strongest in Ukraine, where about 20 percent of the Soviet Union’s population lived. Ukrainian farmers were the most productive in Russia and produced most of the exportable wheat. Ukrainian resistance produced a horrific Soviet response, the seizure of nearly all the wheat crops in the areas of most resistance. This lasted two years and killed nearly four million Ukrainians, about an eighth of the population, Ukrainians called this the Holodomor, which translates as the Great Famine.

Russia denied the Holodomor ever happened, and many Western nations and their mass media went along with that. One exception was Britain, where one British reporter risked his life by going to Ukraine and obtaining proof of the Holodomor. The Russian government kept denying the famine ever happened until 1983, when a more open communist government admitted that many communist crimes were true. This made an impression on Russians because they realized more of the victims of the Gulag prison camps and communist terror in general were Russians. As a result, during the 0ccupations of Crimea and parts of Donbas in 2014, the Russians tried to win the support of locals.

That lowered the civilian death toll but did not turn most of the occupied population into loyal citizens of Russia. By 2020, most Ukrainians in the occupied territories wanted out. The most desperate moved to Russia, many others wanted to get to Ukraine, and others sought to go anywhere but Ukraine and Russia.

The Holodomor and many other past incidents of Russian brutality led to Russian troops being initially ordered to not attack civilians during the 2022 invasion. That failed to cause civilians to be any more receptive to the Russian presence and, within a month, troops were told they could loot and not tolerate any resistance from civilians. Russia denied that civilians were being killed or that widespread looting was taking place. Cell phone cameras carried by most Ukrainians made those claims difficult to sustain. Nor were Russian denials of the heavy casualties inflicted on the Russian forces who believed they would easily defeat the Ukrainians and occupy the capital, Kyiv, within two weeks. After a month of this, Russian troops around Kyiv were ordered to withdraw to Russia and try to conceal evidence of mass murder before they left. This produced some mass graves, but many bodies were left in plain view, and many surviving civilians had video evidence of who did what. Russia again denied it, insisting these civilians were killed by Ukrainian forces to make the Russians look bad. Once more, the video evidence, especially from Ukrainians who witnessed it and could identify some of the perpetrators, made the atrocities difficult to deny.

Mindful of that, Russian occupation forces in parts of Ukraine that were seized early on and are still under Russian control were ordered to try really hard to win over the locals without resorting to mass murder. The main occupation zone lies north of Crimea and centers on Kherson, the capital of Kherson province. Kherson City fell during the first week of the invasion, and Russia has held most of the province ever since. The city is a major port because it is located near the mouth of the Dnieper River and the Black Sea. The Dnieper is a major navigable river for Ukraine and has long been used to move cargo, especially exported wheat.

Ukraine has been trying to recapture Kherson City and province ever since and finally did so at the end of 2023, aided by a growing partisan movement inside Kherson province and passive resistance to Russian occupation by most Ukrainians in the province. Some Ukrainians agreed to work for the Russian occupation, and they were soon the targets of attacks by Ukrainian partisans. Some of the turncoats were killed, but more worrisome to the Russians were indications that other Ukrainian officials quietly agreed to work for the partisans. The Russians now believed many of their Ukrainian administrators had worked with the resistance from the beginning.

At the same time, the Russian occupation forces still had orders to try and win over the Ukrainians or at least discourage them from joining an armed insurrection. To help with that, the Russians sought to Russify the province as quickly as possible. That meant replacing the Ukrainian cell phone service with a Russian one. They blocked Ukrainian TV and radio transmissions. Russian ID documents became mandatory, and using the Russian ruble became mandatory. Access to Russian-controlled utilities, especially water and electricity, depended on how cooperative local civilians were. These efforts aimed to link Kherson to the Russian economy. The initial goal of pacifying the population was to make life safer for Russian troops in Kherson. That was never fully achieved, and since then Russian troops have had to worry about roadside bombs or anti-vehicle mines as well as sniper fire and assassination via pistol or a bomb planted in a vehicle.

The goal was to hold elections that could be portrayed as honest and show a majority of Kherson residents supporting annexation by Russia. Ukrainians didn't cooperate, using clever tactics that Russian Information War specialists recognized and struggled to counter. The Ukrainian resistance was armed and dangerous, but also mindful of the importance of outperforming the Russian Information-War campaign. Some of the American aid packages for Ukraine included a lot of Cold War-era PARM anti-vehicle mines that were never used. The Germans developed these mines to halt or disrupt a Soviet invasion that never came. The Germans believed Ukrainian partisans could use these mines. This proved true, and the Ukrainians wanted more after receiving nearly 15,000. Germany had to resume production to meet Ukrainian demand.

Ukrainians depict the Russian occupiers as worse than the German Nazis of World War II infamy. This is particularly embarrassing for the Russians because the official Russian government justification for the invasion is to liberate Ukrainians from neo-Nazi Ukrainians led by President Zelensky, who is Jewish. This tragicomedy was understood by many in Russia early on and led to a largely unarmed but often violent resistance movement inside Russia and Belarus.

Russia denies the extent of the resistance in Kherson, calling armed partisans local bandits and gangsters. Video proof leaks out of Kherson, and Russian troops stationed there complain to friends and family back home. This intensifies resistance to the war inside Russia, where the government wages its own Information War to generate support for the war or at least discredit critics. The growing inability to suppress accurate news also played a role in the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991. Former KGB officers who brought back so many aspects of Soviet rule over the last two decades are having a hard time dealing with media and image control. It’s the 1980s all over again but worse. This reminds us that the Information War is not a state monopoly and is often a multi-sided conflict.