Entering the Ukrainian market: the checklist I actually give people

Most of the enquiries that reach me are versions of the same question, so this entry is the answer in list form. It assumes a company with a real product or service, a five-year horizon, and no prior presence here. It is not investment advice and it does not substitute for local counsel.

1. Decide what you are actually entering

Selling into Ukraine, manufacturing in Ukraine and buying from Ukraine are three different projects with almost nothing in common. Most failed entries I have seen involved a company that had not distinguished them and ended up doing a bad version of two.

2. Structure before you commit anything

Decide early whether you need a Ukrainian legal entity or can operate through contracts from abroad. A local entity is required for public procurement, for most licensing, for employing staff and for VAT registration. It is not required for straightforward export sales.

Where a local entity is needed, hold it through a jurisdiction with a functioning double tax treaty and a legal system whose corporate law you can rely on. This is standard practice and it exists because Ukrainian corporate law offers weak minority protection in practice.

3. Write your contracts under law you can enforce

Use English law or another familiar system, with arbitration seated outside Ukraine. This is not a comment on Ukrainian judges; it is a comment on predictability and on enforcement timelines. Ukrainian courts have improved and remain slow and uneven.

Define force majeure explicitly and broadly. Standard Ukrainian-law wording is narrow. Define the territorial scope of performance — this matters more here than anywhere else in Europe.

4. Solve payments before the first shipment

Confirm the correspondent banking route for your currency and both banks. Confirm what documentation the Ukrainian side needs for currency control purposes, because payment can be delayed by a missing document that nobody mentions until it is missing.

Check the current rules on dividend repatriation and on cross-border payments before you model returns, not after.

5. Certification takes longer than you think

If your product is regulated — food, pharmaceuticals, machinery, electrical equipment, construction products — start conformity work before commercial discussions get serious. Ukrainian technical regulation is converging on EU norms under the accession process, which is good news if you are already CE-compliant and irrelevant if you are not.

Identify which conformity assessment bodies can certify your category. Capacity is the bottleneck, not the rules.

6. Register in the procurement system even if you are not bidding yet

Public procurement runs through open electronic tendering and the data is public. Registration is cheap and the analytics tell you what the state buys, from whom and at what price. That intelligence is useful even for companies selling privately, because it reveals market prices that are otherwise opaque.

7. Insure what can actually be insured

War risk cover, political risk cover and credit insurance are all available in some form, at cost, from a limited number of underwriters and export credit agencies. Establish what is available for your specific exposure before you size the position. Check whether policies cover detention and delay or only loss.

8. Assume labour is scarce and getting scarcer

The single most common planning error in 2026 is a model built on cheap abundant labour. It is not 2015. Wages in construction, logistics, engineering and skilled trades have risen sharply in real terms, several million working-age people are abroad, and competition for skilled staff is intense.

Budget for automation, for training, and for paying above the local median if you want retention.

9. Pick your local partner on capability, not on access

The most valuable Ukrainian partner is one with operational competence, documented compliance history and a procurement track record. The least valuable is one whose primary asset is a relationship with an official. That model produced results in 2005 and it produces liabilities now, particularly for any company with EU or US parentage.

The three things that most often go wrong

Currency mismatch: taking hryvnia revenue against foreign-currency obligations, or the reverse for a counterparty whose solvency you depend on. This has caused more losses here than any other single error, in 2008, in 2014 and again since 2022.

Assuming a licence or permit will arrive on the stated timeline. Build slack into every schedule that depends on an administrative decision.

Treating the political situation as the primary risk. It is a real risk and it is priced. The risks that actually damage businesses here are mundane: a contract with an unenforceable clause, a counterparty whose finances were never checked, a certification that took nine months instead of three.

Related in this archive

• The trade that did not stop: what kept moving and why it matters
• Turkey and Ukraine: two Black Sea economies and a trade relationship with an unusual shape
• New air routes as a leading indicator of where trade is going

I have given this list in the same order for years and have no reason to change it: each item sits where it does because somebody skipped it and lost money. The item most often skipped is the fourth, payment; the one that costs most is the third, enforceable law. Working through these nine takes a few months — not working through them takes a few years.