For many in UK higher education, the instinct to support Ukraine has been strong and sincere.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, universities have offered sanctuary, mobility opportunities, partnerships, expertise, and moral support. That solidarity has mattered enormously. But the next phase of UK-Ukraine collaboration needs something more deliberate: a shift from helping Ukraine survive to helping shape shared capability for the future.
That means coming to a shared understanding that Ukrainian universities are not just institutions under pressure. They are also institutions of strategic importance to national recovery, innovation, and long-term resilience. In an earlier Wonkhe piece, we argued that universities in Ukraine have the potential to become hubs for innovation, linking knowledge creation to entrepreneurship, partnerships and economic growth. Ukraine’s own innovation agenda points in the same direction, and the UK-Ukraine 100-year partnership has now created stronger policy space for this to happen through the science, technology, and innovation pillar.
Beyond “help”
This is why programmes like UK-UA STEM Pro matter, as a signal of the kind of partnership architecture that is needed now. Led by the Fund of the President of Ukraine in partnership with the University of Warwick, the programme was designed to strengthen UK-Ukraine academic cooperation while giving participants practical tools in commercialisation, technology transfer, industry collaboration, spin-outs, industrial PhDs, and joint laboratories. Its structure matters too: online learning, a study visit to the UK, and then a final stage in which participants are expected to build practical projects with Ukrainian businesses. In other words, it connects people, institutions, and practical application.
Too often, collaboration with Ukraine is still approached through a deficit lens: what can we give, what can we donate, how can we help them cope? Those questions are important, and the multitude of responses have been appreciated by the Ukrainian academic community. Yet after four years of full-scale war, the challenges and questions have moved on. We invite colleagues to consider a different question: what can we build together that is useful to both countries, grounded in reconstruction priorities and capable of lasting beyond the emergency? Research, innovation and leadership partnerships are strongest when they are not extractive, symbolic, or one-directional. They work when Ukrainian institutions are treated as agenda-shaping partners with expertise, networks, and ideas of their own.
That is where the new UK-Ukraine ResearchBridge could become especially valuable. Coordinated by UCL, ResearchBridge is intended to support “tangible collaborations” between UK and Ukrainian researchers and innovators in areas of mutual national interest. It sits under the science, technology and innovation pillar of the 100-year partnership and is explicitly designed to catalyse sustainable partnerships across universities, companies, NGOs and government. Its thematic areas include EdTech and inclusive STEM education, data and AI, GovTech, green recovery, AgriFoodTech, and MedTech. It is also practical in orientation: the platform invites expressions of interest in order to map capacities, identify complementary partners and consortia, and shape future calls, workshops and support mechanisms.
The UK-Ukraine ResearchBridge: Accelerating Reconstruction through Science & Innovation conference, hosted by the Royal Society in March 2026, was a key event. It highlighted collaborations such as bridgeUkraine, surfaced concrete barriers around funding, coordination, and institutional capacity, and reinforced ResearchBridge’s role in turning mutual, co-created UK-Ukraine partnerships into funded, impactful reconstruction work.
Four things to do now
First, stop waiting for the perfect funding call. One of the most useful things institutions can do is map where they already have credible strengths that overlap with Ukrainian priorities. Not every project needs a grand university-level strategy. A good starting point is one department, one centre, or one cross-functional team that can offer something concrete: inclusive STEM education, research commercialisation expertise, knowledge exchange support, digital public services, green reconstruction, or applied health innovation. The ResearchBridge has been set up precisely to help surface these complementarities.
Second, design for reciprocity from the outset. UK colleagues should not assume that a collaboration is equitable just because it is well intentioned. Real partnership means budgeting for translation, time, administration, trust-building, and shared agenda setting. It also means recognising the constraints Ukrainian colleagues work under, including disruption, pressure on time, and institutional strain, while not reducing them to those constraints. Equally, being upfront and transparent about any challenges or barriers on the UK side. Those challenges may be smaller, but they exist and matter too. The best collaborations are demanding and respectful at the same time, they foreground shared meaning making and co-creation.
Third, involve the people who make collaboration stick. Research managers, knowledge exchange teams, innovation offices, and intermediaries are not peripheral here. STEM Pro places such strong emphasis on commercialisation and university-business partnership because capability is not built by researchers alone. If UK universities want durable links, they should connect academic expertise to professional services, civic partners, and where relevant, business and policy actors. That’s why the ResearchBridge is open not only to academics but also to innovators, R&D leaders, knowledge brokers, and interdisciplinary teams at the research-policy-practice interface.
Fourth, think beyond mobility. Visits matter, and STEM Pro rightly includes a study component in the UK. But the deeper value lies in what follows the visit: joint labs, co-developed projects, practical outputs, new partnerships with business, and longer-term innovation ecosystems. UK universities should judge success not by how many delegations they host, but by whether new capability, relationships, and routes to impact remain afterwards.
The opportunity now is to move from sympathetic engagement to strategic win-win collaboration. Ukrainian universities do not only need allies., they need serious partners. UK universities have much to gain from this relationship too: insight into resilience, innovation under pressure, digital transformation, funding, and the co-creation of new models of research and education that matter in turbulent times. If the ResearchBridge can help turn goodwill into structured, mutual, mission-oriented collaboration, then it deserves the sector’s attention now.
