Our Paper on Integrated Crop and Cargo War Risk Insurance with Application to Ukraine is Published!

The front page of today's Sunday New York Times has an article on Odesa, Ukraine, which is painful to read. This very important port city for Ukraine for trade has been subject to relentless bombing for the past few weeks with even a silo of sunflower oil attacked and the oil spilling into the Black Sea. Residents of Odesa have had to suffer from the bombing, and shortages of water and electric power.

We are all connected. A wonderful colleague at the Odesa Law Academy, Borys Kormych, has been a Virtual Scholar through our global partnership between UMass Amherst and the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) in two cohorts. In the most recent one, my Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Ismael Pour, and I have had the honor and pleasure of collaborating with him. We always worry how our colleagues, collaborators, and friends are doing in the illegal, horrific war perpetrated on Ukraine and Ukrainians.

An outcome of our collaboration  is the paper, "Integrated crop and cargo war risk insurance: application to Ukraine," that was published in the January 2026 issue of the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/itor.70038?af=R A reprint of the paper can be downloaded here: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/articles/IntegratedWarInsurance.pdf

Today the President of Ukraine Zelenskyy will be meeting with President Trump in Mar-a-Lago.  

Peace with security must return to Ukraine. 

After almost 4 years of the full-scale invasion by Russia, with billions of dollars of destruction and so much suffering and loss of lives, the war needs to end with the aggressor also paying for all the consequences.