A live legislative process presents the opportunity to make 2026 the year when Europe finally prepares itself to keep society alive through full-scale war. A legislative overhaul of the Union Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM) is now with the ENVI and SANT committees, which are expected to vote on it this autumn. Getting this right requires filling the legislative vehicle with lessons learned through what the UCPM was able to accomplish in Ukraine—and more to the point, what it wasn’t empowered to do and had to leave to Ukrainians.
Landmark milestones in the European project have always advanced through EU responses to crises, including learning lessons from incidents beyond the EU—and civil protection is no exception. The UCPM was born in 2001, informed by the post-Cold War optimism that the main threats to civilian safety were natural disasters, accidents, and humanitarian emergencies. Reforms in 2007 and 2013 professionalised its response and added a preparedness dimension, yet each answered a peacetime emergency, including disruptions made more likely by climate change. The 2019 creation of the rescEU reserve responded to the Mechanism being tested to its limits by forest fires, earthquakes, and floods. And a 2021 Covid amendment let the Commission procure rescEU capacities when every member is hit at once.
Over the past two years, EU leaders have recognised that the next major revision to the UCPM should fill war-related gaps exposed in Ukraine. This is an essential plank of the Preparedness Union Strategy, an impressive political and policy framework that must now be informed by operational substance learned where EU preparedness capabilities have found their limits.
The largest, longest, and most sophisticated deployment in UCPM history was in Ukraine after the February 2022 full-scale invasion. All 27 member states plus six participating states contributed to the delivery of 160,000 tonnes of power generators, transformers, shelter supplies, and other aid. An entire thermal power plant was relocated from Lithuania to Ukraine. In the other direction, 4,700 Ukrainian patients were evacuated to European hospitals. In April 2023, Ukraine became a participating state in the Mechanism.
This operation to aid Ukraine also revealed how the UCPM is not adequately set up to protect people from war. It coordinates the deployment of civilian responders—firefighters, search-and-rescue teams, medics—into natural disasters, not battlefields where the aggressor state deliberately targets those responders. Unequipped to support work in combat zones, efforts coordinated by the Mechanism went no further than hubs in Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. It can coordinate resupply and evacuation work, but not help maintain a front-line city’s systems of providing water, power, heating, education, and healthcare when that civilian infrastructure comes under endless bombardment. That work on the ground fell to Ukrainians, particularly at the regional and local level.
That Ukrainian side of the story is told in Unbreakable Kherson: Ukrainian Wartime Resilience Lessons for Europe, a new policy book co-authored by the German Marshall Fund and the Kherson Regional Military Administration. It is the first operational record of governance under modern war, an insider account from Ukraine’s only regional capital that was occupied and then liberated. Each of the 32 chapters recounts how Kherson approached a certain sector—electricity, water, gas, transport, housing, displacement, demining, training, schools, disinformation, etc.—and ends with a handful of EU policy recommendations, 162 in all.
The book is chock full of lessons that UCPM operators must learn if they are to support civil protection work in war zones. Civil-military standards must guide how infrastructure repair engineers only come in after sappers sweep sites for mines, and even then they work during hours between shelling with small vehicles that don’t attract drone strikes. Cross-sectoral coordination is key, because electricity enables water pumping, which enables heating, and so on. Kherson restored 90% of household power within a month not through heroics but because transformers, wire, and generators were pre-positioned before the crews arrived, which is exactly the kind of strategic reserve the revised Mechanism should hold near front-line states. And the Mechanism must be built to fund years of sustained service continuity, not a single surge of outside aid, because Kherson’s grid, water, and communications were destroyed, restored, and destroyed again. That requires financing flexible enough to pool money on a trigger, the way Kherson blended state, local, and donor funds under conditions normal procurement rules would never permit.
These and many other lessons documented in Unbreakable Kherson distill a learning cycle that would otherwise take many more years and lives to develop. They collectively represent a survival plan that mobilises civil protection capabilities to make cities and regions liveable in the face of criminal efforts by an aggressor state to drive a society into submission. That elevates civil protection to what former European Commissioner for Crisis Management Janez Lenarčič, in his endorsement of this book, calls “the discipline through which a society either survives or breaks.” Rising to that challenge with battle-tested strategies should be the ambition of this year’s UCPM revision.
Josh Rudolph, a co-author of Unbreakable Kherson, is Managing Director and Senior Fellow of Strategic Democracy Initiatives at the German Marshall Fund