On December in Jerusalem, the Ministry for Development of Communities and Territories of Ukraine and the State of Israel signed the Recovery Cooperation Memorandum. Ukraine was represented by Deputy Minister Artem Rybchenko and Israel – by Ze’ev Elkin, Additional Minister in the Ministry of Finance responsible for rehabilitation of the north and south of Israel. Ukraine underlines the importance of adopting the international experience as fast and efficient recovery should be based on state-of-the-art technologies, safe solutions, and people-oriented approaches. For many times, Israel has demonstrated the ability to promptly restore communities after crises and attacks, therefore cooperation between our countries enables us to implement the practices that have proved to be effective.

Both parties reiterated their interest in reconstruction, modernization, and strengthening of the territories resilience, as well as in the development of entrepreneurship, logistics, construction, and infrastructure projects. A great deal of attention is paid to involving investment, technical assistance, sustainable solutions, and innovative technologies that can form a foundation for joint initiatives in the future. As part of the visit, the Ukrainian delegation took part in a meeting of the intergovernmental commission for trade and economic cooperation, which was the first since the all-out war began.

Ukrainian delegates familiarized themselves with Israeli recovery practices, including reconstruction projects in Be’eri kibbutz badly damaged in the attack on October 7, 2023, and a temporary district in Ruhama kibbutz built for evacuees. These examples show how important are immediate decision-making, quality technical planning, and effective construction management.

One of the specifics in the Israeli reconstruction model is a common involvement of consulting engineers. It is these professionals that ensure technical support to projects, help make justified engineering solutions, monitor the quality of work progress, and mitigate risks in all stages of construction. Such an approach make is possible to work fast but maintain high standards of safety and durability of facilities.

Ukraine can also engage consulting engineers in recovery project implementation on a steady basis. Introducing this approach enables to improve quality and control of work progress, avoid technical and financial errors, ensure transparency and accountability, and also integrate international standards of construction management. This will make the Ukrainian market more open to partners and demonstrate readiness to stick to the rules that foreign investors and donors understand.

The signed MoC provides new opportunities for sharing the experience, engaging specialists, joint planning and implementation of projects, as well as using modern instruments to help Ukrainian communities to recover faster and to a higher quality and resilience.