Despite their proximity to the fighting, a handful of small businesses in Kyiv have dared to reopen, or keep going, since the war began
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.
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.
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.
“The system is super complicated right now, but we are trying just to keep this place alive,” he said. 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.
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.
Canada Latest News, Canada Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Russia hits near Kyiv, other city despite vows to scale backRussian forces pounded areas around Kyiv and another Ukrainian city overnight, local officials said Wednesday, just hours after Moscow pledged to scale back military operations in those places. The shelling further tempered optimism about possible progress in talks aimed at ending the punishing war.
Read more »
Ukraine isn't naive, Zelenskiy says after Russian pledge to scale down attack on KyivRussia has started moving very small numbers of troops away from positions around Kyiv in a move that is more of a repositioning than a retreat
Read more »