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A growing body of literature has documented the impact of conflict on cancer care.1 Researchers working in the Middle East, Ukraine and several parts of Africa have shown that war impacts cancer diagnosis,2 reshapes access to cancer services,3 disrupts supply chains and alters treatment pathways.4 The recently published review article on cancer care in wartime Ukraine is an important contribution to this wider scholarship.5 One of its central claims is that oncology services in government-controlled oblasts have been restored to prewar levels, even as the war continues. That recovery, the authors rightly note, reflects the ingenuity and adaptability of Ukrainian oncologists and policy makers, who have used whatever means were available to sustain continuity of care. The result is a level of functionality in cancer services that would have seemed improbable in the first weeks and months after the full-scale invasion in 2022.6While these achievements should be acknowledged, the existing literature on cancer and conflict suggests that much about the present and future of cancer care in Ukraine remains uncertain.7 We highlight three areas of ambiguity. First, war produces workforce losses that are systemic and long-term, and therefore exceptionally difficult to measure.8 The general management of cancer patients depends on every level of the healthcare system, and losses across this wider system will inevitably shape the effectiveness of cancer care. The article’s focus on the oncology-specific workforce addresses one dimension of a suite of elements necessary to fully assess the prospects for Ukraine’s cancer system recovery and resilience. Workforce retention in conflict settings is highly complex and demands analysis from interdisciplinary perspectives, especially the social sciences. How has conflict shaped the social status and economic dividend of healthcare jobs? How have wartime power dynamics impacted which groups or regions get more access to those jobs? Will healthcare workers who fled to neighbouring countries return and, if so, when and under what conditions? Whether the broader erosion of the healthcare workforce proves to be temporary or becomes generationally entrenched remains an open question, one that carries high stakes for the future of cancer care in Ukraine. One of the most serious unanswered questions is whether, when peace eventually comes and border restrictions are relaxed, large numbers of healthcare professionals will seek opportunities in labour-starved markets of Europe.The second area concerns the ways in which a wartime economy reshapes health resource allocation. We still lack sufficient data on how fiscal pressures and emergency financing have redirected investments in health infrastructure across oblasts in Ukraine. Evidence from other contexts suggests that conflict does not merely disrupt access in the aggregate but reorganises it according to social, regional and political distinctions.9 Wartime governance and post-war reconstruction often produce new hierarchies of priority that determine which regions receive upgraded facilities, which populations are deemed politically and strategically essential, and which forms of care are protected or deferred. In oncology, this can translate into uneven access to pharmaceuticals, preferential pathways to specialised care and regionally differentiated investments in facilities such as radiotherapy. The difficulty with any discussion of differential resource allocation is that it is politically sensitive, especially in war due to the need for national unity, but ignoring it now will only exacerbate vulnerabilities later.The third area relates to patient mobility. The article notes that patient numbers increased in western Ukraine as a result of internal displacement, before declining as oncology services were reestablished in patients’ home regions. Alongside this internal movement, some patients have also travelled abroad for treatment. The authors suggest that most patients are now receiving care at regional centres, while those requiring novel drugs or therapies unavailable domestically seek treatment abroad under the European Commission’s Temporary Protection framework. Research from other settings indicates that such mobility patterns often set in motion longer-term redistributions of care, both within countries and across borders.10 Ukraine may therefore need to prepare for the possibility that cross-border healthcare, and cross-border cancer care in particular, becomes a durable feature of the system rather than a temporary response to war. These dynamics are also likely to increase out-of-pocket costs for cancer patients over time. Much more research is needed to strengthen the nascent literature on regional and redistributed pathways to understand how patients navigate these mobility decisions, including how they determine which forms of treatment can be accessed locally and which require travel abroad.11 Importantly, we cannot assume that the European Commission’s Temporary Protection measures will persist once active hostilities cease. Any withdrawal of this framework would risk a major disruption to the fragile arrangements that currently make cross-border cancer care a viable option for many Ukrainian patients. If post-conflict Ukraine is unable to meet patient expectations for cancer care, then increasing numbers may seek care in Europe, irrespective of the cost, to the detriment of the wider Ukrainian health system.If the understanding of cancer in the Ukraine context—and for that matter any context experiencing protracted conflict—is to progress further, cancer practitioners will need to embrace a conceptual and methodical shift towards interdisciplinarity.12 The strength or weakness of cancer care systems cannot be examined in isolation from the wider healthcare system, and the robustness or fragility of the wider healthcare system should not be studied without considering the complexity of social, political and economic dynamics unleashed by conflict. There is a danger that resilience and restrengthening of cancer within Ukraine will simply be met with a standard Western clinical model despite calls for context-driven approaches in conflict and humanitarian spaces.13 The underpinning forces are too complex to be understood through a single lens and require analytical lenses that span oncology, the social sciences, conflict studies and public health.