In 2022, in the middle of the hardest year my country has faced, I became a partner at UAF Partners — a direct investment fund focused on Ukraine’s recovery. People sometimes assume that investing in a country at war is either charity or naïveté. It is neither. It is a bet on the people who are already rebuilding, in real time, under conditions most investors will never have to imagine.
Recovery is not a single moment that begins when the war ends. It is happening now — in the companies that kept paying salaries, kept shipping, kept hiring when every rational model said to stop. That resilience is not a soft quality. It is the single most valuable asset a market can have, and it is being forged right now.
What I look at
The sectors that matter for recovery are unglamorous and essential: energy resilience, logistics, agriculture, manufacturing, and the technology that makes all of them more efficient. I look for teams that solve a real problem for a real customer today — not businesses that only make sense in a hypothetical post-war world.
Why now, not later
The instinct to “wait until it’s stable” guarantees you arrive after the value has been created. The founders who will define Ukraine’s next decade are building today. Capital that shows up now — patient, hands-on, and honest about the risk — does more than earn a return. It signals that Ukraine is not a cause to be pitied but a market to be backed.
I invest in Ukraine’s recovery for the same reason I invest in anything: I believe in the people doing the work. In this case, I also happen to be one of them.