“We had a plan for when the war started,” says Bogdan Nesvit, the 30-year-old co-founder of Ukrainian tech developer Holy Water. “We relocated the female part of the team to Poland. With men not allowed to leave the country, we are all working between bomb shelters and hotels.”
Nesvit is now sharing a hotel room with six of his 80 colleagues in western Ukraine (“It is like a dorm”). He is one of the country’s army of almost 300,000 tech workers who have embarked on an unprecedented migration to keep their businesses running during the Russian invasion.
The hotel where he is now based has turned its gym into a makeshift communal office space – Nesvit estimates it is being used by around 100 workers around the clock – as the relative safety of the west of Ukraine has made it the focus of relocation plans put into play by domestic and international businesses.
Nesvit’s well-rehearsed evacuation – buses were pre-booked to leave from the company’s offices in Kyiv, which served as a rally point for staff and family members as soon as war broke out – is typical of plans put into action by Ukraine’s 8,700 IT-focused companies in cities across the country.
Ukraine’s tech industry is a $6.8bn juggernaut that has more than tripled in size since 2016, with 25,000 new graduates joining the ranks of workers annually. It is overwhelmingly young – 80% are aged 18 to 32 years old – and had aimed to grow to as much as $16.3bn by 2025 before the outbreak of war. And it is fighting back.
Nesvit is a prime example. He used to live in London, studied at Oxford and then University College London (UCL), and worked for the UN in New York and British American Tobacco in London and Ukraine before setting up his own business.
“Ukraine is one of the best countries in the world in terms of technical talent, cost and quality of living,” he said. “Salaries in the Ukraine and US are hugely different, but the talent is of the same skill level. It is a shame the war is happening as the IT industry here is growing so fast.”
The industry has been on a war footing since Russia took control of Crimea and stirred conflict in the Donbas in 2014. These so-called “business continuation plans” were dusted off when Putin launched his “peace-keeping” incursion into the east of Ukraine as a precursor to a full invasion.
Sensing the threat, the IT Ukraine Association tested the sector’s readiness at the start of February with a survey question that would be unthinkable coming from a trade body in most countries: “Does your company have an emergency response plan for such cases as large-scale combat operations, lack of internet access, power outage etc?”
More than 90% said they already had, or were developing, plans to keep Ukraine’s tech sector able to continue to service domestic and international clients.
“It is about measures and actions to protect and make operations safe and able to continue,” says Konstantin Vasyuk, the association’s executive director. “Relocating vulnerable workers, ensuring data is in the cloud, alternative internet connections, transferring staff and specialists to western parts of Ukraine and countries in Europe. Things that can, and have, to be implemented very fast.”
And so far, the plans to maintain digital resilience have helped defy expectations about the level of disruption expected from the full-scale invasion by Russian forces.
Tech consultancy Star, which employs about 600 of its 1,000 global workforce in Ukraine and counts blue chip firms such as Lufthansa, Toyota and IPG as clients, says it is running at 60% of pre-war levels.
“We hadn’t expected operations to stay at anything like that level,” says Star founder Juha Christensen, the former senior Microsoft executive who also founded software company Symbian and is current chair of Bang & Olufsen. “It has been one of the real surprises.”
Christensen says that the approach taken by the company, which paid staff two months’ salary in advance of the invasion in case the banking system was hit, was partially inspired by Israeli companies which, given local tensions, always have contingency plans in place.
He says that 18% of its Ukrainian workforce has moved to Poland and Germany, mostly the female employees, a further 49% are scattered through western Ukraine, and a third remain in Kyiv and central Ukraine, “mostly by choice”.
In addition to employees, Star has relocated about 2,000 family members into western Ukraine, Poland and some into Germany. About a dozen staff have chosen to join the military effort.
“We are going out of our way to make everything voluntary, including whether or not you continue to work on client projects,” says Christensen, who has turned over a house he owns in Germany for use by refugees.
“Kyiv is a large city, about half the size of London in population, and probably square kilometres too, and there are some that live in safer neighbourhoods and have an infrastructure around them. It is a big decision to get up and move, and a lot of patriotic people don’t want to move.”
Nazar Sheremeta, solutions architect for CloudMade, a joint venture between Star and French conglomerate Valeo, has decided to stay in Kyiv, effectively waging what has become akin to a form of internationally-backed corporate resistance across the country, with workers refusing to allow their businesses to capitulate in the face of the invasion.
“I want to help as much as possible in retaining our customers, since financial stability of the company affects my financial stability, which is hugely important in such times,” he said in a message to the London-based chief executive of CloudMade, who reassured him that the company has “strong support” from its biggest client with “no indication that will change”.
Sheremeta’s sentiments were echoed time and again by companies the Guardian spoke to, but he also gave insight to the mounting mental pressure of trying to work while being at war.
“I am trying to distract myself with working matters as much as possible,” he explains in another message. “Otherwise you are simply looking into the news 24/7, and your nerves end out spiralling out of control. Obviously, I am also monitoring mental health to not burn out people too much right now.”
Sheremeta signs off with a touchingly optimistic and defiant tone. “Hopefully this is just a minor set back, and we could achieve some stability once again,” he says, ending with a half-quip. “Preferably with Russian surrender of course.”
While the idea of the vast Russian army surrendering may be fanciful, it is clear that the invasion has not gone according to plan – with Ukraine’s IT army playing its role.
Alexandra Ganzha works for Ukrainian-based IT company Obrio, which has found itself based in Poland after most staff were abroad on a corporate holiday when the war started. She says most workers now operate on three shifts: working on client projects, helping friends and relatives, and volunteering.
The latter spans the spectrum from finding food sources to sharing news on where to find clean water, driving trucks, sharing petrol and relocating people. It also includes turning IT skills to cyber guerrilla warfare.
“We have a fair portion of our people with PhDs in data science, machine learning and of course cyber security, so a fair number are trying to do everything they can to help out,” says Christensen, who next week is relocating to a Star delivery centre in Poland that now serves as a base of operations and link to Ukraine. “Guerrilla warfare can be very effective. Lots of little projects can add pressure. It goes way beyond distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks on systems.”
The digital resistance ranges from soft-power tasks such as attempting to influence public opinion in Russia via social media, raising funds for the war effort (Nesvit has raised more than $40,000 by selling NFTs – non-fungible tokens – of charity works by more than 200 Ukrainian artists), and direct hacking of systems by joining groups such as Anonymous.
“Not everyone is good with a gun,” says the IT Ukrainian Association’s Vasyuk. “People should be used as efficiently as they can. We are fighting with guns, with laptops, we will keep on going.”
