Physical Culture and Sport Development in Ukraine, 2015–2025: Structural Changes and Regional Disparities in Times of Crisis and War

Background: Armed conflict can alter sport systems through damage to venues, disruptions to education, population displacement, changes in public funding, and increased demand for psychosocial support. Ukraine offers an important case for studying these interconnected processes, although administrative time series are not always comparable across years and territories. Objective: To describe changes in selected officially reported sports-facility inventories for 2015–2023 within the wider 2015–2025 policy period; interpret these patterns in relation to sport-science research and the wartime context; and develop a reproducible framework for assessing regional disparities and institutional resilience. Methods: A longitudinal secondary analysis used the State Statistics Service of Ukraine’s Statistical Yearbook 2023 (sports facilities section) alongside Ministry of Youth and Sports reporting portals, World Health Organization documents, and peer-reviewed studies. Absolute and percentage changes, successive-period rates, index numbers and category-specific comparisons were calculated. No unverified 2024–2025 infrastructure counts or oblast estimates were imputed. Results: Between 2015 and 2023, recorded large stadiums decreased from 974 to 825 (−15.3%), sports grounds from 36,065 to 31,200 (−13.5%), football grounds from 10,851 to 10,110 (−6.8%), and tennis courts from 1,127 to 1,104 (−2.0%). Declines between 2021 and 2023 were especially marked for sports grounds (−12.7%) and large stadiums (−11.7%). These figures describe registered infrastructure, not direct combat losses or individual physical-activity behaviour. Conclusions: Ukrainian sports-system development during 2015–2025 should be understood as a multidimensional challenge comprising physical availability, functional access, workforce continuity, population mobility, and participation equity. Available published data document contraction of several facility categories through 2023 but do not support causal estimates or defensible quantitative rankings of oblasts for the entire period. Policy evaluation should combine harmonised facility registers with spatial accessibility and participation indicators.