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Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
KYIV — Some things never change.
Come rain, shine, a blizzard or a missile attack, the colorful blue-and-gold floor mats in the nearly dozen elevators of Kyiv’s Premier Palace Hotel, each prominently stitched to mark the day of the week, are changed overnight by unseen staff.
Presumably, management is worried that unless guests read what day it is as they blearily stagger into the elevators for breakfast, they will be at a loss.
Keeping one’s bearings is important in times of war.
People stick to their regular routines and rituals as best they can here — which can often seem surreal as the ordinary collides with the extraordinary.
When the opening shots of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were fired back in February, with missiles blasting Kyiv’s two main airports and some other targets in the Ukrainian capital, early morning commuters still headed into the city to start their workday.
I remember being struck by the bizarre sight, as it took about an hour-and-a-half for the rush-hour traffic to reverse itself and start screeching back in the other direction.
Nowadays, part of keeping to routine is an act of defiance — a determination to not give an inch. Some of it is bravado. But what’s one meant to do, anyway? Life must go on. One must endure.
Sometimes people heed the air-raid warnings and seek shelter; sometimes they don’t, whether it be from a devil-may-care attitude or a single-minded resolution to not be thrown off course by something as annoying as a war.
Ukrainians are also adding new chores to their daily routines to cope with outages and the discontinuance of water. When there is water, for example, they make sure to fill their bathtubs, so when there isn’t any, they can still flush toilets or have some on hand to wash.
It can seem apocalyptic at night in Kyiv, when the streetlights are out and only a few buildings equipped with generators offer the sole spots of brightness. Residents still go to restaurants and bars, but in much reduced numbers. And on the nights after a missile attack, the streets are eerily empty — very few venture outside.
“It’s nervousness,” said Yuliya, the 33-year-old owner of the small wine bar Vinsanto, which she only bought a few months before Russia invaded. “They think nothing will be operating. But here we are,” she added brightly.
Yuliya opens her doors, come what may. On the night after this week’s missile attack, she sat drinking wine with three girlfriends she grew up with in a small town near Lustk in northwestern Ukraine.
One of the gang, Katya, oversees a product line for Ukraine’s largest online retailer, Rozetka. Sales are 50 percent down compared to last year, although they’ve been picking up with Christmas coming, she said.
Securing foreign merchandise is the biggest headache for retailers, according to Katya. “Once we have ordered, a delivery can take two months; but in reality, we have to think in three-month cycles, and then the problem comes with pricing,” she noted. With Ukrainian inflation roaring at around 25 percent, and European inflation averaging around 10 percent, inaccurate pricing can lead to serious losses.
Paying for the goods then presents its own problem: In the first few months of the war, foreign sellers wanted prepayment and wouldn’t offer credit lines; small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) were cash-strapped. Now, the top brands are allowing bigger retailers a couple weeks to settle after ordering — sometimes up to a month — but businesses are still facing a squeeze.
The government’s been trying to help though. SMEs accounted for 60 percent of the economy before the invasion, and Yulia Svyrydenko, Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister and economy minister, said the government has done a lot, and will do more, to try and ameliorate difficulties.
“At the initiative of the president, we have simplified paperwork, eased regulations and halted some taxes, like the land tax, for individual entrepreneurs,” she told me. For businesses that can’t pay because of the war, taxes have been postponed; and red tape has also been cut — instead of the volumes of documents needed for permits and licenses, simple self-certification will now do.
The government has been helping small businesses with access to finance partnering with the country’s banks as well, offering loans with below-market interest rates. Praising Ukraine’s businesses for their “ingenuity and flexibility,” Svyrydenko noted that “they were the first to relocate to other towns and regions when necessary.”
Earlier this year, the government unveiled micro-finance grants of up to 6,500 Ukrainian hryvnia (€170) to set up small businesses. “A key requirement from our side is that the business will employ at least two workers,” she said. “It is a very popular program.” So far, 10,000 applications have been received, and 2,000 of them have been approved by the banks in partnership with the government.
There are some other bright spots too in this economy that’s contracted by 35 percent this year, with Ukraine’s highly regarded and entrepreneurial IT sector on course to record a surprising 13 percent growth rate.
The country’s digital resilience has been astonishing since the beginning. Even with missile attacks and war raging in the east and south, e-commerce has hardly missed a beat.
In most war zones, cash is king, and you need a large pile of dollars or euros to function — but here, credit and contact cards, Apple Pay and other mobile payment services continue to work. A supermarket down the road from where I write this has just installed a self-checkout system — in the middle of a war.
Meanwhile, the government has also pressed on with its pre-invasion vision of a digital state, with the digitalization of administrative services — offering a range of e-identification portals — developing apace.
The flagship digital program is called Diia — Ukrainian for “action” and short for derzhava i ia, “the state and I.” Launched before the war, more than a third of the population has now registered with the portal, a one-stop shop for a range of public services and a wallet for digital versions of official documents.
Diia has proven invaluable during the war. The government has been using the system to pay social benefits to those living right on the front lines or are in towns and villages besieged by Russia, like Svyrydenko’s hometown of Chernihiv earlier this year. “They get payments on their bank card after they insert the number, and the money goes directly onto it,” she told me.
“Some Ukrainian refugees are surprised [by] how digitally backward some European countries are,” she noted, amusedly.