The head of UN Tourism, Shaikha Al Nowais, named medical tourism and Ukraine's IT sector as the country's strongest cards for winning back foreign visitors after the war, at a Kyiv briefing. Ukraine already holds everything a tourism economy needs, she said, from culture and landscapes to cuisine. Al Nowais, the first woman to lead the organization in its history, was making the first visit by a UN Tourism chief to Ukraine in a decade.

A UN specialized agency publicly treated Ukraine as a future destination rather than a war zone, as Kyiv tries to anchor its reconstruction to sectors that can earn hard currency and bring people back to emptied regions. Both sectors she named were among Ukraine's stronger performers before 2022.

Before the invasion, Ukraine was receiving about 13 million visitors a year, with tourism worth roughly 3 to 4 percent of GDP, RBC-Ukraine reported citing the numbers mentioned at the briefing.

"Bringing all stakeholders in the tourism process together with the state under one umbrella could unlock great potential," Al Nowais said.

A medical tourism hub before the war

Before Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine had a reputation as an affordable place for fertility treatment and surrogacy, dentistry, laser eye surgery, and cosmetic procedures, the US-based Medical Tourism Association said. Prices often ran a fraction of Western European ones. In the late 2010s, the country's medical tourism association counted tens of thousands of foreign patients a year. Because that trade rests on clinics and specialists rather than rebuilt infrastructure, Al Nowais said it could bounce back fairly quickly once the war ends.

A tech sector that grew through the war

Ukraine's IT exports reached about $6.8 billion in 2021, close to a tenth of all the country's exports, and the industry has been one of the few to keep growing through the war. The same ecosystem produced the Diia app, a state-services platform installed by more than a third of Ukrainian adults before the invasion, along with globally used products such as Grammarly and GitLab. A sector that has shown it can ship and scale under bombardment is, on Al Nowais's logic, well placed to build the booking, logistics and guide services a returning tourism market will need.

Ukraine's Acting Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha met her in Kyiv on 15 August 2026 to discuss tourism's place in reconstruction, and UN Tourism agreed to provide 500 scholarships for Ukrainians to study at its Online Academy, 200 of them reserved for veterans, with Kyiv setting the rest of the allocation.

The man who gave thousands of Ukrainian families a chance to bury their closest people has been killed while doing that work. Oleksii Yukov, head of the "Platsdarm" search unit, has died, his wife Yevheniia Kaluhina announced on Facebook.

Yukov's work gave families the one thing that lets grief begin: a body and a name. For nearly 25 years, he searched for the remains of the fallen, recovering them from where the state could not reach so that the dead could be identified and returned to their relatives, ending the agony of families whose loved ones were listed as missing.

Yukov received a fatal wound during the exhumation of bodies on the line of contact, according to soldier Serhii Hnezdilov.

He worked where the state could not reach

Yukov's team operated where it was extremely dangerous or where state services could not go. The recovery missions often took place just a few kilometers from the front line, under the threat of repeat shelling or drone attacks, in the conditions in which he was killed.

His "Platsdarm" unit began by excavating the battlefields of the First and Second World Wars, and from 2014 searched for and evacuated those killed in Russia's war against Ukraine. The number of soldiers given a proper burial through his team's efforts runs into the thousands.

Here is what Yukov wrote in his last post.

"As a searcher, I see war in all its manifestations... Here, human life is worth nothing. Here, everything is unlike in the movies. Between two worlds, we gather bodies and souls to bring them back from the war. And those who have touched war remain with it and in it, because it no longer lets anyone go," he said.

What his name meant

Those who knew him spoke of what his work meant.

"A great loss for me personally and for my circle. For most of his life, he returned names to the dead. He lived in Sloviansk," Hnezdilov wrote, calling Yukov's name synonymous with Ukrainian Donbas and respect for every fallen person he returned to their family.

The head of the Sviatohirsk city military administration, Volodymyr Rybalkin, wrote that Yukov was "forever in the ranks."

"Friend, you are incredible. What you did, few people can do," Rybalkin said.

Yukov lived in Sloviansk in Donbas, where he spent his life honoring, and died on the front line, recovering the dead one last time.