Fatih Şahin Фатіх Шахін Ukraine, business and international experience — since 2004

Practical guides

Two kinds of help: reading paths that tell you where to start, and guides that gather a whole subject into one document.

Start here

An archive of a thousand pieces is forbidding if you do not know where to enter it. Each path below takes a reader with a particular question through it in order.

Ukraine in ten reads

10 pieces

  1. Why a market of forty million deserves attention, and why it usually does not get it
  2. What Ukraine actually produces
  3. Two currency crises, three shocks and a war, on one page
  4. The regional map of Ukrainian output
  5. Governance, measured from where the country started
  6. From neighbourhood policy to accession chapters
  7. The fields: barter, debt, and then a world market
  8. What was built, what was left to decay, and what held
  9. Daily life, as a long-term guest saw it change
  10. How to read a country report without being misled by it

First steps in doing business here

10 pieces

  1. Entering the Ukrainian market: the checklist
  2. Agent, distributor, branch or subsidiary
  3. The registers a foreign company needs to read
  4. Choosing a distributor without regretting it
  5. Getting paid: terms, instruments and reality
  6. Where to argue: courts, arbitration and the clause nobody reads
  7. Getting goods in: the routes and what each costs
  8. Technical regulations and the CE mark question
  9. Sanctions compliance for a company trading here
  10. What a foreign company actually does when a country goes into crisis

Understanding the war

10 pieces

  1. The application signed on the fifth day
  2. Emergency financing: keeping a state solvent
  3. Temporary protection: a directive used for the first time
  4. Generators, transformers and the winter the grid was attacked
  5. Turning demining into an industry
  6. Odesa enters the World Heritage list, in danger
  7. The third year: an economy that learned to function under conditions it was never designed for
  8. What four years of sanctions actually achieved
  9. Rome: from principles and pledges to a pipeline
  10. What accession looks like from the inside of a ministry

Culture and daily life

10 pieces

  1. Why the old layer matters now
  2. The Ukrainian ritual year, mapped
  3. The vyshyvanka: embroidery as a written language
  4. Pysanka: the egg as a written charm
  5. Ukrainian cuisine and the produce economy behind it
  6. Language in daily life
  7. Kyiv for the visiting professional: districts, distances and what is worth the time
  8. Lviv and the western shift
  9. Odesa as a port city and a market
  10. Rural Ukraine, described without romance

Compiled guides

Files compiled from pieces already in the archive, meant to be read end to end. Free and with no sign-up; print one to keep it as a PDF.

Entering the Ukrainian market

6 sections

  1. Entering the Ukrainian market: the checklist
  2. Entering the market now: what has changed
  3. Agent, distributor, branch or subsidiary
  4. Choosing a distributor without regretting it
  5. The registers a foreign company needs to read
  6. The investment support institutions, assessed

Contracts, payment and disputes

6 sections

  1. Getting paid: terms, instruments and reality
  2. Where to argue: courts, arbitration and the clause nobody reads
  3. Protecting capital where the courts are unreliable: what actually works
  4. The insolvency code and the creditor experience
  5. Protecting a brand and a design here
  6. Hedging a hryvnia exposure

Logistics, customs and standards

6 sections

  1. Getting goods in: the routes and what each costs
  2. Authorised Economic Operator status, and what it saved us
  3. The single window at the border
  4. Rules of origin: the clause that decides your margin
  5. Technical regulations and the CE mark question
  6. War risk insurance and the price of moving goods

Reconstruction readiness

6 sections

  1. Reconstruction readiness: what preparation actually means for a company
  2. How reconstruction contracts are awarded
  3. DREAM: a public pipeline for reconstruction projects
  4. Consortium models for reconstruction contracting: who does what and who carries what
  5. Building to European standards from the start
  6. Insuring reconstruction risk

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Useful links on Ukraine

The primary sources this archive rests on. All of them official bodies or institutional data providers.

Government and law

Economy and statistics

Trade, tax and customs

Investment and company data

Reconstruction and international bodies

Energy and agriculture