UK-Ukraine Twinning scheme marks three years of partnership and innovation

The Twinning collaboration with Edge Hill University not only enhances our standards with British teaching methodology, but grants human support from like-minded academics, making us feel not alone in efforts to continue working, teaching and developing. We've already felt the impact on our students and staff through online learning and in-person events and have even more ambitious common plans for the future. This friendship became crucial in maintaining our resilience and energy for recovery and reconstruction in the legal educational sphere.

This project represented a unique opportunity to harness and redirect the collective power of the skills and equipment gained through the war towards rebuilding a safe, low-carbon, nature-based Ukraine. We are actively seeking new funded opportunities to work with our friends and colleagues at Cherkasy around the use of drones to enable not only building evaluation and reconstruction, but extending our citizen science model to landscape regeneration.

During the first two years of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Twinning programme was key to establishing safe havens for students and university staff who were in need of asylum; it fostered rapid relief for Ukrainian universities whose communities were shocked by violence and mass destruction.

However, the Twinning programme quickly evolved with a focus on joint degree programming between resilient Ukrainian universities and experienced UK counterparts. The established joint programmes have become foundations for long-term partnerships between researchers at twinned universities and friendships between their students. These will surely outlast the current war, as they reflect the shared fundamental values that underpin the UK-Ukraine relationship.

I couldn't be prouder of our team and the remarkable commitment shown by UK universities in supporting the Twinning initiative. Since 2022, we've built 105 partnerships that have generated over £70 million in support.  

But the true heroes are our Ukrainian colleagues, whose extraordinary resilience has kept higher education alive despite power outages, air raids, and displacement. Their determination to maintain academic excellence even in wartime demonstrates why this partnership matters – not just as emergency aid, but as an investment in Ukraine's future rebuilding and recovery.

I am incredibly proud of the way that the UK university sector has stepped up to support Ukrainian counterparts during the last three years of conflict by doing a huge range of things – from sharing kit and facilities to supporting students whose learning has been disrupted to continue and complete their courses with their home universities. These relationships have grown and deepened, to be mutually beneficial in ways we could not have imagined when the project was first conceived.

Three years ago, UK and Ukrainian universities came together in a show of solidarity, forming partnerships that have helped sustain higher education in Ukraine through the ongoing conflict. Since its launch, the UK-Ukraine Twinning initiative has grown into a powerful network of more than 100 Twinning relationships, providing vital support to students, academics and institutions in Ukraine.

We have been proud to support this initiative and to witness the incredible resilience, innovation and collaboration it has fostered between our two university systems. As we mark this anniversary, we hope that these partnerships continue to grow, strengthening our collaboration and helping create lasting impact in the years ahead.