Not a single Ukrainian university has made it into the top 1,000 in the world according to the 2026 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), published by ShanghaiRanking. Consequently, for the second year running, Ukraine has no representation in the main Shanghai ranking.
Ukraine is not included in the official list of countries and territories that have at least one university among the 1,000 best higher education institutions published for 2026. However, according to data from the Experts Club information and analysis centre, the list includes Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia.
The same situation was observed in 2025 – Ukraine was also absent from the countries represented in the ARWU top 1,000.
The last time a Ukrainian university appeared in the main Shanghai Ranking was in 2024. At that time, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv was ranked in the 901–1,000 bracket. The university’s official ShanghaiRanking profile still lists this result as its most recent inclusion in the ARWU.
The Shanghai Ranking does not directly measure the quality of teaching, student well-being or the employability of graduates. It is very strongly focused on the scale and international visibility of research.
In particular, the ARWU 2026 was compiled using the most highly cited researchers from the Clarivate list published in December 2025. For the indicator of publications in *Nature* and *Science*, papers from 2021 to 2025 were analysed, whilst publications indexed in Web of Science in 2025 were used to calculate total research output.
This means that, unlike previous editions of the ranking, the ARWU 2026 now features a significantly greater representation of research output from Ukrainian universities produced directly during the war. In the 2024 ranking, for example, the Nature and Science indicator covered the period 2019–2023.
However, it cannot be stated outright that Ukraine’s drop out of the top 1,000 was solely due to the war. The ARWU is a comparative global ranking: a university’s position depends not only on its own performance but also on how rapidly competing universities in other countries are increasing their research output and citation rates.
This competition is particularly evident in the case of China. By 2026, mainland China will already have 234 universities in the published top 1,000 and 16 in the top 100, whereas a year earlier there were 13 Chinese universities in the top 100.
For Ukraine, the situation serves as a telling indicator precisely in terms of international research competitiveness. Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv managed to break into the ARWU for the first time in 2024, but by 2025 it had dropped out of the top 1,000 and was unable to return to that ranking in 2026.
Source: ShanghaiRanking Consultancy, Academic Ranking of World Universities 2026.
The ranking assesses more than 2,500 universities and publishes the top 1,000.
EXPERTS CLUB, SHANGHAI-RANKING, UNIVERSITIES AROUND THE WORLD
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