Small businesses may look marginal, but for individual households they represent independence and survival
Originally published on Global Voices
The war in Ukraine, with its multiple effects, has been taking its toll on various sectors, and small businesses are not immune. Yet, some businesses manage to oppose the widespread infrastructure and supply-chain problems, labor shortages, and limited access to finance — and among these, a special place belongs to women.
A UNDP-supported study found that 83 percent of small businesses were negatively affected by the war; the prevalence of women-led business has also increased since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. Many women have become entrepreneurs because of displacement, loss of household income, absence of a partner serving in the military and, last but not least, the need to combine flexible work with family care.
According to The New Voice of Ukraine, women accounted for nearly 60 percent of newly registered sole proprietors in the first quarter of 2026, compared with about 49 percent at the beginning of the conflict.
It was also women who, in 2025, headed 12,757 newly established companies — 34 percent of all newly formed enterprises. According to data from March 2026, women lead approximately 32 percent of registered Ukrainian companies.
Victoria Belim-Frolova. Personal archive. Used with permission.
“War can destroy a business quickly, but it also creates a constant process of adaptation”, says writer and journalist Viktoria Belim-Frolova, somewhere from Ukraine, via our chat interview. “Somewhere” feels like a fair description, because she is extremely mobile, having lived and worked in eastern Ukraine and frontline communities for more than two years now. She moved back to Ukraine from Brussels in 2024, and has been reporting on how women are forced to adapt because of the war.
Local businesses — including the women-led ones, she says — tend to not give up so easily. Instead, they “relocate, become smaller, change their products or services, or operate under circumstances that would ordinarily make running a business impossible.”
Kramatorsk’s Pink Coffee Shop. Photograph by Victoria Belim-Frolov. Used with permission.
Global Voices (GV): We all know that war inevitably affects economics and business. You have been in Ukraine for a long time now; how would you describe the dynamics?
Victoria Belim-Frolova (VBF) People relocated, companies moved operations, employees learned to work through blackouts and air raids, and businesses became much more geographically dispersed. But statistics don’t necessarily capture what economic life feels like on the ground. In eastern Ukraine, I have watched the commercial life of entire cities contract. Shops close. Restaurants disappear. Businesses move west or abroad. Skilled people leave. A place can still exist on the map while gradually losing the economic ecosystem that made normal life possible. At the same time, war creates new sectors and transforms old ones. Ukraine now has an extraordinary defense-tech industry. Engineers who might once have worked on commercial technology are developing drones, communications systems and other military technologies. So, I would describe the Ukrainian economy less as simply declining than as being violently restructured by war.
GV: What happened to once thriving sectors like information technology?
VBF: One of the striking things about Ukraine is that the economy has not simply collapsed. It has adapted, although very unevenly. IT is a good example. Before the full-scale invasion, it was one of Ukraine’s great success stories, and it remains remarkably resilient.
GV: What about the online craft business in Ukraine, which was often women-dominated?
VBF: This is actually one of the areas I would be careful about describing as simply disappearing. Online commerce has given small Ukrainian producers something extremely valuable during the war: access to customers who are not physically in Ukraine. For someone making ceramics, jewelry, embroidery, clothing, cosmetics or other handmade goods, the local customer base may have become poorer or disappeared altogether. But an online business can potentially sell to Warsaw, Brussels, London or New York.
The difficulties are substantial: disrupted logistics, electricity cuts, displacement, increased costs and the simple psychological difficulty of running a tiny business while your country is at war. Yet, these businesses can be unusually adaptable precisely because they are small. I’ve become increasingly interested in these very modest forms of economic resilience. We tend to talk about the Ukrainian economy through GDP, reconstruction costs and major industries.
But there is another economy made up of a woman selling embroidered shirts online, someone baking cakes from her apartment, a market vendor arranging tomatoes every morning, or a displaced person restarting a tiny business in another city. These activities may look insignificant individually. Collectively, they are part of what keeps society functioning.
GV: Your specific sphere of interest is how women and their communities help each other. What examples do you observe?
VBF: One that stays with me is Anastasia, an 18-year-old woman I met in Mykolaivka, a town near Kramatorsk, where the security situation has been steadily deteriorating. She taught herself to do gel manicures by watching videos online, and eventually became the last manicurist still working in her town.
What surprised me was how far women were prepared to go to see her. Some came from neighboring towns, traveling [along] roads exposed to drones, simply to have their nails done. It would be easy to dismiss this as something frivolous during a war, but I think it shows exactly the opposite. The manicure was not only about beauty. It was self-care, a small assertion of normality and control, and an opportunity for social connection.
Anastasia’s little business created a space where women could sit together, talk and feel like themselves for a while. For me, this is also an example of what small businesses can mean to communities during wartime. Their value cannot always be measured simply by revenue or employment. A tiny business can become part of the social infrastructure of a place. And when these businesses disappear, communities lose more than economic activity. They lose places of connection, routine and normal life.
Kramatorsk’s Pink Coffee Shop. Photograph by Victoria Belim-Frolova. Used with permission:
GV: How does the decline of community wealth affect people’s mental health?
VBF: Poverty during war is not only about having less money. It is about losing choices. When a community becomes poorer, people’s radius of possibility shrinks. You postpone medical treatment. You stop travelling. You buy cheaper food. You cannot repair your apartment. Eventually, you may not have the resources to leave a dangerous place.
I see this very clearly during evacuations in [the] Donetsk region. Leaving requires resources. You need somewhere to go, money to rent another apartment, transportation, documents, perhaps someone who can help an elderly parent or a child. People sometimes remain in extremely dangerous places partly because everything they own is there.
GV: What about women in this context?
VBF: Women often carry a particular burden because they are managing households, children, and elderly relatives while also trying to earn an income. Many have also been displaced while their husbands or partners are serving in the military. Economic insecurity therefore becomes intertwined with an enormous burden of care and responsibility.
There is also a psychological effect that is difficult to quantify. When a café closes or a market becomes half empty, you lose more than a business. You lose places where people meet, exchange information and feel part of a community. The impoverishment of a city is also an impoverishment of its social life.
GV: Is there hope at the end of the tunnel?
VBF: I don't really think about hope as something waiting at the end of the tunnel anymore. In Ukraine, especially close to the frontline, nobody knows how long the tunnel is. What interests me much more is what people do inside it.
In Kramatorsk, I have watched people leave their homes and give vegetables from their gardens to the volunteers evacuating them. I have seen people meet for coffee after nights of explosions. Markets still open. People teach classes, repair roofs, take elderly neighbors to hospital, rescue animals and go back to work the following morning.
None of this means that everything will be fine. I think there is sometimes too much pressure to turn Ukrainian resilience into an uplifting story. People are exhausted. They are losing homes, livelihoods and people they love. But resilience is real. Hope, for me, is less a feeling than an accumulation of very small actions that keep ordinary life functioning when almost everything is working against it.
GV: How does poverty change communities and women-led businesses?
VBF: It [is] much more visible, but what strikes me is how resourceful people become. People grow food, preserve vegetables, exchange things, rely on relatives and neighbors and combine several sources of income.
Small amounts of money matter. Informal networks matter enormously. So do pensions and humanitarian assistance. For women, small businesses can become particularly important. Their activities may look marginal from the perspective of macroeconomics, but for an individual household they can mean independence and survival.
There is another side to this resourcefulness, however. Having to become endlessly inventive because your income disappeared, your husband is at war, your children were displaced and your savings are running out, is survival, and we don’t need to romanticise it.
