War is forcing businesses in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv to find novel ways of staying afloat

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Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine last month, Maxym Starushko sent his wife and children to Poland from their home in Kyiv, and then he headed to his hometown just west of the capital.

He got so fed up watching the news that he went back to Kyiv and made a bold decision, given the city’s proximity to the fighting: He reopened the restaurant where he’d been working as a waiter.

“I need a job and I don’t want to sit at home and just listen to the news and be depressed,” he said during a short break at the Saw Fish, a seafood restaurant, on Thursday. “And of course people want food.”

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He unlocked the doors last week. His initial plan was to serve free meals to pensioners – with the consent of the restaurant’s owners, who welcomed his gumption and kept in close contact. But soon regular customers started trickling in as well, and now Mr. Starushko, 39, is pulling in enough revenue to expand the free meal service.

The Saw Fish is among a handful of small businesses in Kyiv that have dared to reopen, or keep going, since the war began. Most shops, hotels and restaurants have been closed tight, and the city centre is a virtual ghost town, with few cars and even fewer pedestrians. The primary signs of life are checkpoints manned by soldiers carrying machine guns, who stand behind cement barricades and piles of sandbags.

A recent study by Kyiv-based Gradus Research found that, of Ukraine’s nearly two million small-business owners, 35 per cent have suspended their operations and 3 per cent have no plans to reopen. “I think that we can talk about half a million or even 600,000 small businesses forced to close,” said Olga Vaganova, a Gradus spokesperson.

But the study also found that 37 per cent of Ukrainian companies have started adapting to the new reality. “Entrepreneurs work hard to save their business and thrive through the war,” Ms. Vaganova added.

The war has forced many entrepreneurs to come up with novel ways of staying afloat.

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At the Saw Fish, Mr. Starushko has learned to be flexible. He drafts his daily menu based on whatever food he can source. That means the restaurant’s seafood specialties have been partly replaced by chicken or beef dishes. There is no printed menu, just some handwritten notes he jots down on paper and reads out to customers.

A further complication is the restaurant’s electronic equipment, which has been shut down since the start of the war. Mr. Starushko has been unable to restart the systems, and as result he has to do all his receipts, invoices and bookkeeping by hand. If someone wants to make a cashless payment, they have to e-transfer the money to Mr. Starushko, who sends it on to the restaurant.

He has been able to keep only about one-third of the restaurant’s staff – just three cooks and three waiters. But Thursday afternoon the place was buzzing. A handful of hungry patrons had their choice of 15 items, including seafood pasta, a variety of salads, herring, beef stroganoff and sushi. Mr. Starushko will get a boost on Friday when a government restriction on the sale of alcohol is partly lifted.

“The system is super complicated right now, but we are trying just to keep this place alive,” he said.

A few blocks away, a branch of the Tsyriulnyk chain of barber shops was jammed with customers on Thursday. All six chairs were occupied. The shop has been open since early March, and offering free cuts to soldiers and police officers. Regular clients have returned, which has generated enough revenue to cover the shop’s overhead, according to one of the barbers, Alexander Zhyravel. ”It’s a hard time for our nation,” he said. “But it’s just a little bit of a more normal situation in Kyiv these days, and we can cut.”

Many locals have had to either change career paths or take on different tasks at their employers since the start of the war.

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Ievgen Ivanoy, 46, used to take photographs and do in-house videos for Nova Poshta, Ukraine’s largest parcel delivery service. Now he’s packing boxes at a branch office, working as many as nine hours a day on a volunteer basis. The company has shifted much of its focus to helping deliver humanitarian aid and get parcels to people in the military. And Mr. Ivanoy wants to do his part. He’ll keep volunteering as long as he’s needed, he said.

Dmytro Sytnyk, who works at the front counter of the branch, has had to rethink something even more basic: how he gets to work. A Russian missile slammed into a shopping mall in his neighbourhood and cut off access to some transit services. His solution was to get a bike and cycle eight kilometres to the office each day. Mr. Sytnyk, 22, said the workload at the branch has become so intense since the war started that he and some staffers often stay late into the evening and sometimes sleep in the office overnight.

Nova Poshta’s operational director, Yevhen Tafiychuk, said the company has had to rethink almost everything since the war started. The delivery service has had to cut around 30 per cent of its staff. Nearly half of its 3,500 branches have been affected by the fighting.

Before Russia’s invasion, Nova Poshta was expanding rapidly and e-commerce accounted for the vast majority of its business. Now most of the company’s services have been directed to helping firms move their operations west and getting humanitarian supplies from Poland to battle-torn cities such as Kharkiv, Mykolaiv and Donetsk, where Nova Poshta’s offices have been turned into aid depots. “Before the war our focus was on small parcels, now it’s big cargo and non-standard packages,” Mr. Tafiychuk said.

Some companies have adapted by completely changing their business models. The Wine Love restaurant used to be a quaint hideaway that served fine food and expensive wine. Now, chef Katrin Tkachuk and a team of volunteers are cooking 900 meals a day and donating them to hospitals and soldiers.

The restaurant had been relying on regular donations of food, but Ms. Tkachuk recently struck an arrangement with the U.S.-based charity World Central Kitchen, which is expected to offer some financial support.

“I can’t not do this. It’s very important,” Ms. Tkachuk, 36, said Thursday as she stood among boxes of donated supplies. “I must be here. If I can cook some food for somebody then I will do this.”

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