The Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe recently called for local and national authorities to work together to help Ukraine recover and rebuild four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country.

The message is clear: cities and regions must lead, and their counterparts around the world should help them do it. The congress also calls on Russia to pay for the damage it has caused, pointing to frozen Russian assets worldwide as one source for those funds — an acknowledgment that recovery cannot wait for the war to end, since communities are already rebuilding under fire.

As a lead author of the report underpinning the congress’s call to action, I want to explain why it matters and why Canada, in particular, has both the track record and the responsibility to step up.

The scale of what needs to be done

The numbers are almost impossible to absorb. By the end of 2024, direct damage to Ukraine’s buildings and infrastructure had reached approximately US$176 billion, with more than 2.5 million households destroyed or damaged.

Total aggregate economic losses from the invasion are estimated at more than US$1.1 trillion. Nearly 6.8 million Ukrainians have also sought refuge abroad, the largest displacement of people in Europe since the Second World War.

Behind every statistic is a community struggling to survive — a mayor trying to keep schools open under missile attacks; a municipal council managing hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons with dwindling resources; a city engineer repairing the same water system for the third time after it was bombed yet again.

Local and regional authorities across Ukraine face these situations every day. And it is precisely because the challenges are so local — tied to specific communities and capacities — that the response must also be local.

Ukrainian decentralization reforms since 2014 have expanded the fiscal capacity of the........

© The Conversation