Despite power cuts and blockades, Ukraine’s economy is coping

Tomas Fiala is not too fussy about his wine. But he recently opened a bottle of red that tasted particularly good. The bottle was dusty—not from a long sojourn in a French wine cellar, but from a bomb that Russia dropped on a warehouse in the outskirts of Kyiv, leased by Mr Fiala’s firm to a local distributor. The bomb smashed 1.5m bottles, but a few cases survived, were cleaned up and put on sale under the label Vyzhyvshi (survivors). “I wanted a dusty bottle,” says Mr Fiala, in a packed Italian restaurant in Kyiv.Mr Fiala, a Czech businessman who founded Dragon Capital, now the largest Ukraine-based investment bank, has been working in Ukraine since 1996. He is a survivor, too. His investments span media, commercial property, shopping malls and agricultural machinery. “On February 24th when Russia attacked, I thought [that] was it,” he says. But he decided to stay: “You have to be on the ground to make the right decisions.” In March he recorded a 90% fall in revenue. But by September he had recovered 50-70% of that. Some of his investments, such as malls in Lviv, are back at pre-war levels.