About this archive

This site began in 2004 as a set of private notes. Ukraine was then a country most foreign business people could not place precisely on a map of risk: too large to ignore, too unpredictable to underwrite. Two decades later that has not entirely changed, but the reasons are different, and the record of how the reasons changed is what this archive is for.

The material here follows one discipline. Every entry tries to separate what happened from what it means for someone with money, staff or contracts exposed to the country. Political drama is covered only where it moves a tariff, a tax rate, a licence, a border crossing or a currency. Personalities matter here mainly as the authors of decisions that show up later in a customs code.

What is in the archive

Roughly nine themes run through the collection: macroeconomics, foreign trade and investment, politics and governance, energy and infrastructure, reconstruction, European integration, agriculture, society and the regions, and a series marking the national calendar. The timeline is the fastest way in: it lists the turning points year by year and links to the longer pieces written around each one.

How to read the dates

Entries dated before 2011 were compiled retrospectively from contemporaneous records — statistical releases, official gazettes, central bank bulletins and the trade press of the period — and reviewed afterwards. They carry a note saying so. Entries from 2011 onward were written closer to the events they describe.

What this is not

It is not investment advice, and it is not a news service. Nothing here should be treated as a recommendation to buy, sell, enter or exit anything. Where a figure matters to a decision, check it against the primary source; the archive names its sources so that this is possible.