UCU Days: International meeting «Recovery of Ukraine: Global Academic Solidarity»

14 Sep 2022

During the International meeting «Recovery of Ukraine: Global Academic Solidarity» we have had attendees registered from the USA, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Romania, Spain, the UK, Ireland, Argentina, Peru, Lebanon, the UAE, Philippines, India. We are so blessed to have so many friends who support us, believe in us and pray for us!  



We would like to share some insights and the flow of the meeting. 

As we talk about Recovery, numbers scare Ukrainians and the whole World. Devastation is huge. At the same time, plans and discussions about the future give Ukrainians a lot of hope. The goal of the panel discussion was to reflect on the current state of economic, social, and human capital and its role in the Recovery process. What are the lessons learned by Ukrainians in the last six months?  Where the focus in the future should be and how to create a new social contract in society that would emphasize better recovery with the engagement of all stakeholders. What role do international friends and partners play in immediate and longer-term help?

 Here are some of the speakers’ talking points:

  • This war is not for the territory. It is a war of senses, ideas, the vision of the future, and values. 
  • Ukraine is a battlefield, solidarity hub, moral ground, and an international social laboratory.
  • Immediate Recovery has already started on liberated territories, but we should think about how to build back better.
  • The recovery formula of Ukrainian recovery could be resilience + innovations. 
  • Education is and will be fundamental to our capacity to stay as a state and as a society. If we do not think through and discuss with our children in schools what’s happening right now, what are the causes of it, and how history and education are important, we will not move very far from where we are.
  • It has been a Ukrainian defense of human dignity. And the way people have come together globally, spontaneously, bottom-up, neighbor to neighbor is a response to the call for human dignity. 

The panelists: 

Vlad Rashkovan, Alternate Executive Director, International Monetary Fund, representing Ukraine and fourteen other states on the IMF Executive Board. 

Anna Novosad is a Ukrainian educational activist and co-founder of the charitable foundation savED. She served many years in various positions at the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, including serving as Minister in 2019-2020. 

Archbishop Borys Gudziak, Metropolitan of Philadelphia, President of the Ukrainian Catholic University. 

Volodymyr Turchynovskyy, Dean of the UCU Faculty of Social Sciences, Director of the UCU International Institute for Ethics and Contemporary Issues.

Dmytro Sherengovsky is UCU Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs and Internationalization, a political scientist with special interests in International Relations and Conflicts, Human Rights in International Politics, and Regional and Global Security.

Moderator: Sophia Opatska, Vice-Rector for Strategic Development, Founding Dean of the UCU Business School, and member of the Board of the European Federation of Catholic Universities.

Sophia Opatska added that The Ukrainian catholic university had put a list of books and movies. So universities, colleges, and schools can do  one very concrete step in supporting  Ukraine – can buy those for your library so that students, staff, and faculty  can learn about Ukrainian history, culture and values not from russian narrative but from what we believe in: https://lvbs.top/mpb

The  full discussion can be followed by the link: