Not a single Ukrainian university was included in the top 1000 universities in the world according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities 2026 (ARWU) published by ShanghaiRanking. Thus, for the second year in a row, Ukraine was left without representation in the main Shanghai ranking.
In the official list of countries and territories that have at least one university among the published 1000 best universities in 2026, Ukraine is absent. At the same time, 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 not among the countries represented in the top 1000 ARWU.
The last time a Ukrainian university was represented in the main Shanghai ranking was in 2024. Then Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University entered the 901–1000 group. The university's official scorecard on the ShanghaiRanking website still records this very result as its last entry to the ARWU.
The Shanghai ranking does not directly measure teaching quality, student comfort or graduate demand. It is very strongly focused on the scope and international visibility of scientific research.
In particular, when compiling the ARWU 2026, the most cited researchers from the Clarivate list published in December 2025 were taken into account. For the index of publications in Nature and Science, works for the years 2021–2025 were analyzed, and when calculating the total scientific output, publications indexed in the Web of Science in 2025 were used.
This means that, unlike previous editions of the rating, in ARWU 2026 the scientific results of Ukrainian universities directly during the war are already significantly more represented. In the 2024 ranking, the Nature and Science indicators, for example, covered the years 2019–2023.
However, it is impossible to directly claim that Ukraine's fall from the top 1000 occurred solely as a result of the war. ARWU is a comparative global ranking: the position depends not only on the own indicators of a particular university, but also on how quickly competing universities in other countries increase their scientific productivity and citations.
This competition is particularly well visible on the example of China. In 2026, mainland China will already have 234 universities in the published thousand and 16 in the first hundred, while a year earlier there were 13 Chinese universities in the top 100.
For Ukraine, the situation becomes an indicative signal precisely from the point of view of international research competitiveness. KNU named after Taras Shevchenko managed to make his way to ARWU for the first time in 2024, but already in 2025 he dropped out of the top 1,000 and was unable to return there in 2026.
The original source is ShanghaiRanking Consultancy, Academic Ranking of World Universities 2026.
The rating evaluates more than 2,500 universities and publishes the 1,000 best.
