After five years of war, how do Ukrainian small businesses survive?

Five years into the full-scale invasion, small businesses across Ukraine have absorbed the war's damage while quietly reshaping who runs the country's economy. A UNDP-backed study found 83 percent of small businesses negatively affected, even as women's share of new sole proprietorships climbed from about 49 percent at the war's start to nearly 60 percent by early 2026, with women heading 34 percent of newly formed companies in 2025.

Journalist Victoria Belim-Frolova, reporting from eastern Ukraine and frontline towns, describes an economy less collapsing than being violently restructured: shops and restaurants vanish in contracting frontline cities even as a defense-tech sector booms and IT proves stubbornly resilient. Online craft sellers, cut off from local customers, have found buyers in Warsaw, Brussels, London and New York instead.

Her clearest example is Anastasia, an 18-year-old in Mykolaivka who taught herself gel manicures from online videos and became the last manicurist in her town, drawing clients along drone-exposed roads from neighboring communities. The desk notes this isn't framed as frivolous but as one of the small, uncounted mechanisms — alongside embroidery sellers and home bakers — that keep a wartime society functioning.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.