Since February 2022, Ukraine has become a life-size laboratory for the exorbitant cost of modern war. The reconstruction estimates are dizzying: $524bn over 10 years, according to the World Bank and the UN. To put that figure in perspective, it’s nearly 2.8 times the country’s annual GDP in 2024.
A sum all the more gigantic given that the Ukrainian economy collapsed by around 30% in 2022. To hold on, Kyiv received more than $160bn in international aid in two years, a financial drip without precedent in modern history, which Trump, followed by a few European reactionaries, has started to call into question.
Ukraine’s military budget now accounts for a considerable share of national GDP, turning the country into a war economy where every hryvnia counts. The United States alone has released more than $1.1bn just for the Patriot system in Ukraine, enough to build thousands of social housing units or modernise an entire hospital network. Which led Trump to say he was entitled to a few rare-earth mines in return, along with reconstruction contracts for American companies.
A little further away, Syria offers a nightmarish picture of what becomes of a country after more than a decade of war. Here, reconstruction estimates range between $300bn and $1,000bn depending on the source. A gap that speaks to the scale of the destruction and the uncertainty hanging over the country’s future.
Syria’s GDP fell by 83% between 2010 and 2023. 15,000 doctors have fled the country, 7,000 schools have been destroyed. Oil production, once a source of national pride, fell from 383,000 to 90,000 barrels a day. An entire country has been set back decades.
But the most insidious cost is the human capital that has vanished. Those 15,000 Syrian doctors who left represent 20 years of training each, roughly €2M of human capital per doctor: $30bn of medical know-how gone. Not counting the engineers, the teachers, the researchers... Generations of brains trained at the Syrian state’s expense who now enrich other countries. War doesn’t only destroy the present, it mortgages the future by draining nations of their intellectual substance. And at that price, we haven’t even included the cost of political destabilisation and of human rights cut to the bare minimum. Or below.
The 2023-2024 conflict in Gaza shows how modern war can wipe out an economy in a few months: $53.2bn over 10 years to rebuild this territory of 365 km² ($145M+ per km²).
That’s the price of an entire luxury residential neighbourhood for every square kilometre laid waste.