Green Economy Transition in Ukraine: Decoupling, Structural Breaks, and Post-Socialist Constraints

Abstract

This paper evaluates green economy implementation in Ukraine during 2005–2024 and benchmarks its performance against Poland and Romania as post-socialist EU comparators and Germany as an advanced EU benchmark. Using data from the State Statistics Service of Ukraine, the World Bank, and Eurostat, the study applies the Tapio decoupling model and OLS regression with structural-break indicators. The results indicate that Ukraine achieved only weak decoupling between economic growth and CO₂ emissions. Improvements in energy efficiency and renewable energy deployment remained limited relative to the selected comparator countries. The analysis identifies statistically significant structural breaks coinciding with the 2014 and 2022 conflict periods, indicating changes in the relationship between economic activity and CO₂ emissions. The findings indicate that the green transformation in Ukraine is not only limited by the technological disconnect, but also by institutional and structural legacies of the socialist legacy. The policy implications include the necessity to align reconstruction to the EU environmental standards, enhance the carbon pricing mechanism, and assist the industrial regions with the help of the well-developed just transition framework.Copyright© 2026 The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the license CC-BY 4.0., which permits any further distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Article’s History: Received 25th of July, 2026; Revised 31st of August, 2026; Accepted 17th of September, 2026; Available online: 30th of September, 2026. Published as research article in the Volume XXI, Fall, Issue 4(94), 2026.