Doing Business in or Around Conflict Zones

For companies considering Ukraine, the phrase “Si vis pacem, para bellum” has a concrete commercial meaning: prepare for future opportunities by building the capacity to withstand continued war.

Ukraine is currently far from an investment haven. For multinational companies already present, the immediate decision is whether to stay and what investments and security measures are needed to sustain operations. For most prospective entrants, conventional cost advantages alone do not justify committing capital under current conditions.

However, a few sectors offer exceptional opportunities which may trigger the need to enter: Drone and defense technology combine deep operational expertise with an unprecedented cycle of development, testing, and feedback from actual deployment.

Energy and critical infrastructure resilience offer experience in maintaining, decentralizing, and restoring infrastructure under sustained attack — knowledge with potentially significant international applications over the next decade.

Reconstruction and mineral resources are the runners-up: opportunities that warrant preparation today because of their long development horizons.

What Is Driving the Change

The contest between shield and sword

One obvious overriding force drives and constrains change in Ukraine: the war. In its fifth year of the full-scale invasion, businesses and institutions continue functioning through the sustained effort of people operating in survival mode. Their resilience should never be mistaken for spare capacity or evidence that disruption can be absorbed indefinitely.

The contest between shield and sword keeps evolving at a pace and in directions that defy reliable prediction and outstrip corporate planning cycles. The evolution of drone warfare illustrates this dynamic. During the winter of 2026, Ukraine advanced its interception capabilities against drones attacking its cities, reducing their ability to disrupt urban life and business operations. By the summer, Russia’s increasing deployment of jet-powered drones flying higher and faster presented new interception challenges. Each development demands another defensive response, requiring time and resources, with no guarantee of restoring the previous level of protection. Within months, the operating environment can change materially, leaving companies to reassess assumptions that had only recently appeared sound.

Alongside its deployment of jet-powered drones, Russia has increasingly shifted to daytime attacks. For businesses, this means interrupted shifts, delayed deliveries, repeated sheltering, and further pressure on already exhausted employees.

Key takeaway: A security assessment that supported an investment decision only a few months ago may no longer provide a sound basis for continuing operations.

At the same time, the pressure to survive accelerates innovation. Defense technology, energy resilience, and logistics adaptation develop around immediate operational needs. The same war that makes investment difficult creates demand for solutions whose applications may extend far beyond Ukraine.

What the Experience of Ukraine Reveals

Institutions

Ukraine’s experience shows that institutions can continue functioning through a prolonged war while retaining many of their pre-war strengths and weaknesses. The legal and administrative system remains operational, but longstanding problems persist: administrative friction, uneven enforcement, and corruption risks. Foreign investors should neither assume institutional collapse nor expect wartime solidarity to have resolved these weaknesses. In some areas, the pressures of war have magnified these weaknesses.

Within government-controlled territory, the war has not produced regions governed by warlords or autonomous local powers replacing the state.

Alternative channels are not necessarily improper

First and foremost, it is entirely possible for well-governed companies to operate in Ukraine in a compliant manner, including during active warfare.

Ukraine’s experience reveals an unusual institutional dynamic: foreign companies and larger domestic businesses often have more effective avenues for defending their rights compared with smaller local businesses. Such uneven access is problematic from an institution-building perspective, but it remains a practical reality. Over the years, institutional weaknesses, including corruption, have prompted the development of additional channels for seeking lawful redress when ordinary administrative processes fail. These channels can make an otherwise rigid system more responsive.

Three sources of support work fairly effectively: the Business Ombudsman Council, business associations, embassies. They provide complementary channels for addressing complaints, advocating for businesses, and escalating concerns. Alongside these support mechanisms, independent anti-corruption enforcement institutions, including NABU, provide a further avenue for accountability where misconduct falls within their remit.

Key takeaway: For foreign companies, understanding how and when to use these channels can be an important part of operating in a compliant manner. Often, simply raising a concern through one of them can prompt the authority involved to reconsider its position and engage constructively.

Implications for Multinational Companies

Local third-party due diligence peculiarities

Ukraine’s active independent media and strong anti-corruption civil society generate extensive scrutiny of businesses and public officials. Alongside legitimate investigative reporting, paid publications and information campaigns may serve commercial interests or discredit competitors. The result is an extremely crowded information environment containing allegations of widely varying quality and significance.

Routine open-source screening can therefore produce extensive adverse findings without establishing what they mean for the proposed transaction.

Companies should reconsider: An adverse-media summary concerning a Ukrainian counterparty should not automatically trigger rejection. The number of allegations alone is an unreliable measure of risk; their credibility, relevance, and current status matter.

The practical response should be: Assess findings in their local context by examining the sources, supporting evidence, and subsequent developments. Distinguish allegations from investigations and judicial findings. Targeted follow-up questions and supporting documents can clarify concerns, reveal mistaken associations, or establish whether an issue has been resolved. Local expertise should help assess the credibility and relevance of adverse information, not explain away inconvenient findings.

What Comes Next

Our prediction is that over the next 24–36 months, Ukraine’s strongest investment opportunities will continue to center on defense technology and resilience. Companies should plan for persistent security uncertainty, even if hostilities diminish. Ukrainian solutions developed under wartime pressure are likely to attract further international partnerships, while broader reconstruction investment will depend on credible security arrangements and available financing.

The development to watch is whether international interest translates into sustained orders and joint ventures with Ukrainian companies — and whether reconstruction pledges become financed, executable projects.

Bottom Line

Compliant operations in Ukraine are possible, but commercial viability depends on the capacity to withstand a war whose risks keep changing.