Cheese Kingdom, once Ukraine's largest specialist cheese chain, will suspend operations by the end of 2026, citing security risks, co-owner Lyubov Nikolayeva told LIGA.net on October 16.
A specialist cheese shop, with cheese wheels and wine on wooden shelves. Photo: social media
The chain, known in Ukrainian as Syrne Korolivstvo, sold more than 100 kinds of European cheese and had 84 stores at its 2021 peak. That fell to 48 by June 2025 and to 32 by October, Forbes Ukraine reported on October 16. Nikolayeva said the company could no longer guarantee the safety of customers and staff, and that the war made it harder to develop the network and recruit. She described the move as a pause rather than a final exit from the market.
The suspension of a mid-sized consumer business follows Ukraine's heavy industry out of the game. Russian missiles halted about 90% of Ukraine's steel output on September 20, and the country then went a whole week without producing steel for the first time in a century.
Iuliia Mendel, former press secretary to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and now a journalist, pointed to the chain as evidence that "more and more businesses are shutting down in Ukraine". "Large industry, such as metallurgy, has already been lost. Medium-sized business is now following. Prolonging the war will only make it worse," she wrote in a post on X, describing Ukraine as "turning into a forgotten gray pit where ordinary life becomes impossible".
Partner-run franchise stores in the relatively safer western regions will keep trading. About 40% of the network was franchised before Russia's full-scale invasion, Forbes Ukraine reported.
A year of losses before the decision
The revenue of Syrne Korolivstvo Ukraine LLC fell 27.5% in 2025 to UAH27.9mn, and its net loss widened to UAH8.3mn from UAH860,000 in 2024, according to Forbes Ukraine. The chain employed about 250 people across Ukraine in June 2025.
A Russian attack on June 23, 2025 destroyed its Kyiv head office, together with its servers, databases and equipment. By then the business had already been loss-making for about a year. The war was not the only pressure: supermarkets have widened their ranges of European cheese, and Ukrainian craft cheesemakers have taken a growing share of the market, the magazine said.
Retail under fire
Cheese Kingdom is closing as Russia systematically targets Ukraine's retail sector. Ukraine's biggest supermarket chain ATB has suffered losses running into billions of hryvnias at warehouses hit by Russian strikes, and a series of attacks on October 13 destroyed about 85% of the stock at Epicentr's last major logistics centre in Khmelnytskyi.
The larger chains have so far absorbed the damage. Ukrainian retail revenue rose 18% in the first half of 2026, but fewer retailers finished the half in profit — 1,272 against 1,354 a year earlier — as gains concentrated at the top of the sector, according to Opendatabot data.
Smaller companies are in a worse position. A survey published in August found that 28.8% of Ukrainian SMEs were on the verge of closure in the first five months of 2026, and 58.7% had cut the scale of their operations, as costs rose by an average of 19.1%.