Rebuilding Ukraine's Math Pipeline Under Fire

Part 1 of our look at Ukraine’s IMO system showed how top math students are adapting to war.
Part 2 delves deeper into adaptations in the country’s Olympiad system.

By Zarina Kodyrova

Students like Ostap, who we met in Part 1, are set to compete on the world stage, but sustaining excellence over the years requires identifying top students by the thousands. The Olympiad system is adapting to find more such students, but the challenge is compounded by a brain drain crisis. 

Ukraine’s talent drain is difficult to measure precisely, but one broader indicator gives a sense of the pressure the country faces. Its score on the Human Flight and Brain Drain Index — a measure that considers the economic impact of human displacement on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst — went from 4.9 in 2018 to 5.8 in 2021 before reaching 8.4 in 2024.

The index does not directly track Olympiad students or coaches, but the wider pattern it captures is particularly felt within Ukraine’s mathematics Olympiad community. Before the war, former participants often stayed involved for years, developing training programs, serving on juries, writing problems, and coaching the next generation. Many now live abroad, leaving Ukraine with fewer experienced people to pass on the knowledge that sustained the program.

Ukraine’s IMO team leader Bogdan Rublov notes that this year's Kyiv Olympiad jury does not include a single one of last year's Kyiv graduates. "That's simply a disgrace," he says. He doesn't blame the students so much as the timing — in his view, Ukraine loses talented teenagers not because they leave, but because they leave too early, at 16 or 17, before finishing a bachelor's degree at home. 

"At 17, that departure is simply too soon,” he says. “They don't yet understand what they want, and their parents push them out. I'm convinced most of them would have turned out better if they'd just changed the order of those steps."

The talent drain has become visible even at the highest levels of competition. At IMO 2025, Ukrainian students competed not only for Ukraine but also as members of the German and Irish teams — a stark illustration of how displacement scatters mathematical talent across borders.

The long-term implications extend beyond Olympiad results. Ukraine is losing potential scientists, researchers, and educators who may have strengthened its academic and research sectors for decades. While some may eventually return, each talented student who leaves represents not just individual potential but a weakening of the entire knowledge ecosystem. Mathematical Olympus continues recruiting new coaches while supporting those who remain, but the challenge compounds with each year the war grinds on.

Even for students who stay, the pull abroad is a constant undercurrent. Ostap, who is aiming for Cambridge, is candid about how much his Olympiad record factors into that plan: he sees it as one of the few reliable paths to funding an education he says his family otherwise could not easily afford. It's a reminder that the same credentials keeping Ukraine's Olympiad culture alive are also, for many of its most talented students, a ticket out.

Expanding access amid crisis

Even as war has scattered Ukrainian students, reforms have made the mathematics Olympiad system more accessible. 

Displaced students presented a big challenge. For the 2025–26 academic year, Ukraine's Ministry of Education and Science introduced the 'foreign district,' allowing displaced students to participate in the National Ukrainian Olympiad and IMO selections from abroad. This administrative change recognized a painful reality: Ukraine's mathematical talent is now scattered across Europe and beyond.

The Ministry also introduced structural reforms to democratize access. Previously, students advanced through a multi-stage process beginning with school-level competitions, where each school could nominate only a limited number of winners. This created bottlenecks that potentially excluded talented students from under-resourced schools.

The new system abolished the school stage entirely, allowing students to register independently for regional competitions. The impact was immediate. In Kyiv alone, participation in the first stage of the National Mathematics Olympiad increased from 2,725 students in 2024 to 6,800 in 2025 — an increase of almost 150%.

Results under fire

At the highest level of competition, however, the results are mixed. From sixth place in 2021, Ukraine dropped to 17th in 2022 — still remarkable given the circumstances. The slide continued: 31st in 2023, then 38th in 2024. But in 2025, the team climbed back to 24th place, suggesting that the adaptations described above may be yielding results.

Rublov is blunt about what counts as success now. "For me, as Ukraine's team leader, a bronze medal at the IMO is far from a success," he says. "Silver is a completely normal result. Every one of our children should be fighting for at least a silver medal. Gold — that's a real achievement." 

He traces the recent performance more to a shrinking pool of candidates than to any other cause: where the team once rarely dropped a point on the first and fourth problems, "now we worry about the first problem too, because the depth of the bench is simply smaller." 

However, results can defy prediction entirely — Rublov recalls the year Ukraine placed 4th globally with a team he considered only middling on paper, and a disappointing 22nd-place finish in Hong Kong fielding two of the country's strongest students in many years. "How do you predict that — acclimatization, or something else? I don't know."

Staying ambitious

What is clear is that Mathematical Olympus maintains ambitious goals despite the current constraints. The organization is working to identify talent across all Ukrainian regions, not just major cities.

The organization also preserves a specific dream: hosting the International Mathematical Olympiad. Ukraine was scheduled to host in 2024 — plans that war rendered impossible. Rublov, who helped organize Ukraine's hosting of the 2019 EGMO, believes the country could do it again once the war ends, in Zakarpattia, Lviv, or even Kyiv — but only with genuine backing from the Ministry of Education. "If the minister isn't interested in it happening, we won't convince him," he says. "But if we get someone who is — and I think we're ready — then a year or two after the war ends, we'd be glad to do it."

For today’s students, the future looks less like a fixed destination than a series of small acts of continuity. Ostap has already started teaching younger students at his own lyceum, following the example of an alumnus barely older than himself. He isn't sure yet whether he'll ever write Olympiad problems himself — "that still feels like something almost unreal and hard," he says — but he expects to keep teaching, wherever his own path leads.

Whether Ukraine can rebuild its Olympiad program to pre-war strength depends on factors far beyond mathematics: how long the conflict continues, if infrastructure can be restored, and whether the brain drain can be reversed. Despite those uncertainties, the program has continued operating throughout the war and, in some areas, even expanded its reach.

The meaning of persistence

During wartime, maintaining a mathematics Olympiad program can seem like an unlikely priority. With limited resources and an existential struggle underway, it is reasonable to ask: Why maintain elite mathematics competitions when the nation is fighting for existence?

Rublov answers with an old joke: a crowd gathers at a zoo enclosure when a child falls in among the crocodiles; a man jumps in, pulls the child out, and hands the child back — and the crowd immediately turns on him, demanding to know what fool let him do something so reckless. 

"Honestly, I don't know what fool keeps me in these Olympiads," he says. "It's become like autopilot — you get up, do your exercises, brush your teeth, and go." What keeps him going, he says, isn't habit but succession: he doesn't want the whole system to collapse after he eventually steps away, whether by choice or otherwise. He hopes the initiative to sustain it increasingly comes "from below" — from the students and teachers themselves.

Students like Ostap, running a study session by phone flashlight in a Kyiv basement, assert that Ukraine remains more than a battlefield. It remains a place where young minds pursue knowledge, where intellectual achievement matters, where future possibilities still exist.

In Kyiv, a street near the university where Yulia Zdanovska studied now bears her name — a permanent reminder of what was lost and what must be preserved. Russia's missile ended her life, but her community continues the work she began: sustaining the next generation of Ukrainian mathematical talent.

For Rublov, that continuity matters. He does not want the system to depend on any one person, but to be sustained by successive generations of students and teachers. Ostap, already teaching younger pupils while preparing to compete at the IMO himself, is one example.

More than four years into the full-scale war, Ukraine's mathematics Olympiad community is smaller, more dispersed, and operating under conditions few of its members could have imagined before 2022. But it is still operating. Demand for intellectual challenge persists even when safety cannot be guaranteed. 

Results at the IMO will fluctuate. But as long as Ukrainian students and teachers continue solving problems — whether in classrooms, shelters, or while scattered abroad — the intellectual tradition survives. The system endures not because circumstances permit it, but because students and educators refuse to surrender this aspect of Ukrainian intellectual life. 

Their perseverance suggests a deeply held belief: that preserving the capacity for thought, for challenge, for excellence, is itself an act of resistance. And in that resistance lies the possibility of renewal.

Read Part 1 here.