Ukraine’s shelter system has changed little despite more than four years of Russia’s full-scale war and billions of hryvnias in funding. Why does the country still struggle to protect civilians, where is the money going, and what can Ukraine learn from Israel’s approach?
The problem no one is addressing
Ukraine’s shelter system is one of the war’s most overlooked problems. After more than four years of Russia’s full-scale invasion, almost every part of the country remains within reach of Russian missile or drone attacks — yet the system meant to protect civilians has changed little.
In early June, Ukraine’s Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, published an analytical report on the condition of the country’s shelters. Inspectors visited 1,066 facilities across Ukraine and found problems in 993 of them — 93% of the total. The findings echo an investigation by Slidstvo.Info published at the end of 2025, which found that out of Kyiv’s 4,300 designated shelters, only 77 were fully functional protective structures, with enough space for just 1.8% of the capital’s population.
The issue, then, is not simply how many shelters exist on paper. The real question is whether they can actually protect people when Russian missiles and drones strike.
Gaps in the legislation
Ukraine’s shelter rules are set out in the national building code DBN V.2.2-5:2023. But architects say the document itself contains a built-in weakness: it was not designed around the full range of threats Ukraine’s shelters now face. According to members of the National Union of Architects of Ukraine, including Serhii Rasputnyi and Tetiana Zhydkova, these gaps directly affect the ability of shelters to protect people.
One passage in the introduction is particularly telling: “These Standards do not include design scenarios involving a direct hit by munitions with an explosion on the surface or in the immediate vicinity of the walls (covering structures) of protective facilities (except for direct impact by fragments), as well as the effects of high-explosive and directed explosions, the impact of shaped charges, or munitions with delayed underground detonation.”
In effect, the standard contains an explicit disclaimer: it does not cover the consequences of a direct hit on a shelter.
The shortcomings go beyond that. Ukrainian shelters are generally not designed with two key risks in mind: the concentration of large numbers of people in one place and the time needed to reach safety. Given Russia’s tactics, this is a serious vulnerability. Russian forces have repeatedly targeted places where people gather, whether civilian or military. At the same time, Ukrainian law requires the locations of all protective shelters to be entered into a public register. As a result, Russia knows exactly where large numbers of people are likely to gather during an air raid alert.
Ukraine’s shelters were not built for the existential war the country is fighting today — a war where the warning siren can come only moments before the strike, leaving people with seconds to find cover.
Many of Ukraine’s existing shelters were either built during the Soviet era or designed according to Soviet-era standards. They were created with a different threat in mind: intercontinental missiles launched from thousands of kilometres away, leaving enough time for people to reach a shelter, even if it was located some distance from where they lived or worked. That logic no longer applies to Russian missile attacks, which can reach Kyiv, for example, in just 3–5 minutes.
In March 2026, a law came into force requiring all new residential and infrastructure projects to include shelters. But these facilities are still being built according to the existing DBN standards, meaning Ukraine risks reproducing the same vulnerabilities built into the civil defence system of the last century.
Where the shelter money is going
Shelters may have serious design problems, but that is only part of the story. There is another question: where is the money meant to build and maintain them actually going? The money exists, but the results are far harder to see.
A report by Ukraine’s Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights shows that state funding is largely concentrated on school shelters. The government allocated UAH 6.2 billion for them in 2025 and another UAH 5 billion in 2026. But publicly accessible shelters — the ones ordinary residents rely on during attacks — receive no direct state funding at all. Instead, homeowners’ associations (OSBBs) are often left to pay for their upkeep and improvements themselves.
Local authorities are expected to fill some of that gap. In Kyiv, the city administration allocated more than UAH 2.1 billion this year for shelter construction and major repairs. Officials planned to build 39 new shelters and renovate another 141 in 2026. Yet according to Slidstvo.Info, during the nearly six months covered by its investigation, Kyiv’s civil protection network added just one new shelter.
International partners have also stepped in. The largest initiative so far is the Civil Protection Shelter Coalition for Ukraine, launched in November 2025 with an initial €22 million in grants from partner countries and organisations. Its goal is to move Ukraine away from scattered, temporary solutions and towards a modern nationwide shelter network, with a particular focus on frontline communities and regions facing the heaviest attacks.
The question is no longer only how much money is being allocated — but whether it is producing the protection civilians actually need.
At the Coalition’s third meeting in June, officials reported that it now includes 12 countries and four international organisations. So far, funding from Coalition partners has supported seven shelter construction projects at schools and healthcare facilities across the Sumy, Chernihiv, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
For now, however, the scale of internationally funded shelter construction remains modest, with just seven projects underway.
Can Ukraine adapt Israel’s shelter model?
Israel’s approach to shelters is built around a different principle. In the 1990s, the country moved away from large communal shelters after identifying two major risks: concentrating large numbers of people in one place and the time it takes to reach safety.
Instead, Israel adopted a model of individual-collective protection — smaller shelters designed for limited groups of people and located as close as possible to where they live, work, and study.
Across Israel, schools, apartment buildings, public facilities and other structures are equipped with safe rooms designed to protect a limited number of people. Their location is determined by how quickly people can reach them during an attack. Rather than sending hundreds of people into one large shelter, buildings typically have several safe rooms [mamads – ed.], allowing people to spread out and avoid creating large groups that could become targets.
These rooms are usually stacked vertically throughout a building, forming a reinforced structural core. Where buildings have basements, this core extends through the basement level and rests on its own foundations.
The difference is particularly visible in schools. In Ukraine, hundreds of children may still have to move into a single large shelter when an air raid alert sounds, creating both a logistical challenge and a potential target. In Israel, students can take cover in nearby safe rooms almost immediately, without everyone being concentrated in one place.
The Israeli model is not a guarantee of safety, of course, especially in the event of a direct missile impact. But it reduces some of the risks built into large collective shelters and makes it much harder for an attacker to target a single location where hundreds of people are gathered.
Ukraine needs a new shelter strategy
Now nearly five years into the war, Ukraine’s shelter system is still struggling with the same fundamental problems — above all, the regulations that govern how shelters are designed and built. But even under the current rules, the picture remains deeply troubling: a report by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights found shortcomings in 93% of the shelters inspected.
With Russian missiles reaching Ukrainian cities within minutes, the priority is simple: people need to be able to reach safety quickly, and shelters need to avoid concentrating large numbers of people in one place. Israel’s model of individual-collective protection offers one possible way forward.
The funding is already available, through both state budgets and international support. What is missing is a shift in the rules themselves — a new approach to shelter design that reflects the reality of the war and provides Ukrainians with the protection they actually need.
