From Resilience to Resurrection: Ukraine’s Family Businesses and the Next Economic Miracle

The economic history of Central and Eastern Europe is largely a history of families starting again. War, occupation, nationalization, hyperinflation and the chaos of the 1990s repeatedly wiped out what one generation had built and left the next to begin from almost nothing. Family capitalism in our part of the world has always had less to do with inherited wealth than with stubbornness – the habit of rebuilding because there was no other choice.

Ukraine is now living the hardest chapter of that history. Russia’s full-scale invasion has killed and displaced people on a scale Europe has not witnessed in generations. Families have lost sons and daughters, homes, towns and the businesses they spent some 30 years building. Factories in Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia and Mykolaiv have been hit repeatedly. Employees have gone to the front, moved west or left the country, and supply chains that took decades to assemble collapsed in weeks.

Something else has happened alongside the tragedy. Ukrainian entrepreneurs have developed, under conditions no business school could simulate, capabilities that may shape the country’s economy for a generation. They have learned to run companies through blackouts, reroute exports overnight, make decisions with incomplete information, and keep their teams together when every rational signal says to stop.

None of this guarantees an economic miracle. If one comes, though, Ukraine’s entrepreneurial families are likely to be among its architects, and the rest of the region has a strong interest in helping them.

Other Topics of Interest

Lavrov Claims Peace Deal Would Mean End of Zelensky’s ‘Regime’

Russia’s foreign minister accused Zelensky of sabotaging negotiations, claiming a deal acceptable to Moscow and Washington would end his rule.

The first transfer between generations

The private economy that emerged across Central and Eastern Europe after communism was built largely by founders. In Poland, Romania, Czechia, Slovakia and the Baltic states, people with little capital and no family business tradition to draw on created companies that became national brands and, in some cases, regional leaders.

Most of those founders are now in their sixties. The region is approaching its first large-scale transfer of businesses between generations, and it is doing so at the worst possible moment: just as artificial intelligence, geopolitical fragmentation and a hardening global economy change the rules for everyone.

The challenge for these families is no longer preserving what the founder built. It is whether the second generation can reinvent it. Many heirs were educated in London, Vienna or Boston, speak the language of technology and venture capital, and are not sure they want to run a distribution company or a building-materials chain. Families that treat succession as a handover of keys will struggle. Those that treat it as a chance to rethink the business stand a much better chance.

Ukraine faces the same transition with the added weight of war. Founders have stayed to hold their companies together while sons of military age serve or cannot leave, and while daughters, spouses and grandchildren are scattered across Poland, Germany, Romania and further afield.

Millions of Ukrainians are still living abroad. This dispersion is painful, but it may also be an unexpected asset. A generation of young Ukrainians now understands European markets, languages and regulations from the inside. If even a fraction of them return, or stay abroad as partners of family firms at home, Ukraine will have a diaspora bridge few countries could design deliberately.

Resilience, reinvention, resurrection

I think of the Ukrainian business story in three stages.

The first stage has been resilience. Companies have continued operating through missile strikes on the power grid, months of scheduled outages, labor shortages, and the permanent uncertainty of not knowing what the next night will bring. Many relocated production westward, bought generators and batteries at their own expense, and found new routes for exports when the Black Sea was closed.

When Russia walked away from the grain deal in July 2023, Ukraine opened its own maritime corridor from the Odesa ports, and the Danube ports at Izmail and Reni, together with Romania’s Constanța, carried a share of the trade that nobody would have predicted two years earlier.

This resilience deserves recognition, but it should not be turned into a heroic marketing story. Keeping a company alive while your employees are in the trenches and your family sleeps in a corridor away from the windows is not an entrepreneurial adventure. It is a burden that no business owner in Western Europe has had to carry in 80 years.

The second stage is reinvention, and it is already underway.

War has forced rapid experimentation in logistics, distributed energy, digital public and private services, advanced manufacturing and defense technology. Nova Poshta, a company founded in 2001, has kept delivering through occupation and blackouts, and has continued expanding into Moldova, Poland and other European markets.

Ukraine’s drone and defense-tech ecosystem, supported by the state’s Brave1 platform, has grown from a handful of workshops into an industry that foreign militaries now study. Women have taken on far greater responsibility as owners and managers as men have been mobilized, and many businesses will be run differently after the war because of it.

The third stage must be resurrection, which I mean as something more ambitious than reconstruction. Reconstruction restores what was destroyed. Resurrection creates the conditions for something stronger, more competitive and better connected to emerge.

Ukraine should not aim to rebuild its pre-war economic structure, with its dependence on raw commodities and its weak institutions. It should aim to produce a generation of family enterprises able to compete across Europe and beyond: industrial firms that combine manufacturing with automation and data; agricultural groups that move up the value chain into processing and biotechnology, logistics companies that become digital platforms.

That will not happen on courage alone. Resilience is not a business model. These companies will need long-term capital, affordable war-risk insurance, reliable courts, predictable taxation, and access to the single market.

Western institutions and investors are right to ask hard questions about governance, and Ukrainian family businesses will need to answer them better than the oligarchic groups of the past did. There is an important distinction here that outsiders sometimes miss: a family enterprise built on competition, reputation and reinvestment is not an oligarchy built on proximity to power. Ukraine’s European future depends on the first model growing at the expense of the second.

A regional alliance of business families

Ukraine’s future champions should not have to grow up alone, and Central and Eastern Europe offers a natural set of partners.

Polish family firms bring industrial capacity, logistics depth and long experience of selling into Western European markets. Romanian entrepreneurs can help build the southern axis: the Black Sea, the Danube, Moldova and the corridor running from Odesa through Galați to Constanța, which the war has turned from a theoretical project into a working artery.

Czech and Slovak businesses bring manufacturing and engineering know-how; the Baltic states bring digital governance and the experience of integrating quickly into European structures while living next to Russia.

The opportunity is to go beyond ordinary trade towards real partnerships between families: joint ventures, co-investment, shared expansion into third markets, technology transfer and even exchanges between successors, so that the next generation of a Ukrainian family spends a year inside a Polish or Romanian group and the reverse.

Picture a Ukrainian machine-building family partnering with a Polish manufacturer, a Romanian logistics group and a Japanese technology investor. Or Ukrainian agrifood entrepreneurs building value chains with family enterprises from Brazil or India, where multigenerational groups dominate the same sectors.

Family-to-family alliances have a particular strength. Both sides tend to think in decades rather than quarters, and both sides understand that trust is personal before it is contractual. In a region where institutions are still maturing, that matters.

The principle underneath all of this should be simple. Ukrainian families must take part in their country’s reconstruction as owners, investors and strategic partners, not as subcontractors in their own rebuilding. If the billions pledged at successive Ukraine Recovery Conferences flow mainly to foreign contractors, Ukraine will get new roads and bridges and a weaker private sector. If they help Ukrainian companies scale, the country gets both.

The human dimension

The Fourth Industrial Revolution adds another layer. AI, robotics and automated manufacturing will change how family businesses compete and what successors need to know. Ukraine has a head start in some of these fields precisely because the war forced it to adopt them fast.

At a TEDx event in Brussels, I presented a leadership framework I call LEAD21, built on three dimensions, Soul, Spirit and Singularity, and held together by what I call the Human Quotient. Soul stands for empathy and responsibility for the consequences of our decisions. Spirit stands for purpose, courage and the ability to inspire the people who come after us. Singularity stands for embracing AI and technological progress while keeping human judgement at the center of leadership.

For Ukrainian business families, these are not abstractions. Their experience shows that leadership under extreme pressure depends less on analytical brilliance than on courage, solidarity and the ability to keep people believing that tomorrow is worth working for.

As AI makes analysis cheap and widely available, those qualities will become more valuable, not less. Technology can help Ukraine rebuild faster. The people leading its companies will decide what kind of country that rebuilding produces.

Family Business New Deal 2036: Ukraine and Central and Eastern Europe

The coming decade is a chance to rethink family capitalism across the region, with Ukraine at its center. I would call it a Family Business New Deal 2036 for Ukraine and Central and Eastern Europe: a shared ambition to move entrepreneurial families from resilience to reinvention, from reconstruction to international competitiveness, and from survival to leadership.

Such a New Deal would rest on five commitments. The first is preparing the next generation for technological change, so that successors inherit capability and not only shares. The second is building family enterprises with professional, transparent governance that foreign partners and lenders can trust. The third is accelerating cross-border investment and internationalization, including through the EU accession process, which will open Ukrainian firms to the single market and expose them to its competition.

The fourth is connecting Ukrainian entrepreneurs systematically with established business families in the region and around the world. The fifth is making sure the recovery strengthens communities, dignity and social trust, so that it does not reproduce the inequalities that weakened Ukraine before the war.

Ukraine could become the most important laboratory for this approach. Its families have lived through extreme disruption, and they carry knowledge about operating under stress that companies in calmer countries will increasingly need as the world becomes more volatile.

Through my work on “Superclans”, I have come to see succession, internationalization and reinvention as one challenge rather than three. Families that last are not the ones that guard their wealth best. They are the ones that keep recreating value, generation after generation.

A New Deal for Ukraine and the region should be built on that insight: less an investment fund than a platform for leadership across generations, for trusted international partnerships, and for a new understanding between business families and the societies they belong to.

From survival to leadership

Ukraine’s entrepreneurial families have already shown that survival under unbearable pressure is possible. The task now is to turn survival into reinvention, reinvention into resurrection, and resurrection into leadership.

That will not happen by itself, and nobody should pretend the suffering was a price worth paying for future growth. The human cost of this war cannot be offset by any commercial success, however large. But Ukrainians have every right to turn what adversity has taught them into lasting prosperity, and they should not have to apologize for that ambition.

For the rest of Central and Eastern Europe, supporting it is not charity or solidarity alone. A prosperous, integrated Ukraine with strong private companies is the best security guarantee the region could ask for, and the largest economic opportunity it will see this century. For business families around the world, Ukraine offers the chance to take part in something larger than another investment cycle.

Whenever and however the fighting ends, the measure of success should be clear. Ukraine should become more than a country that rebuilt its economy. It should become a country whose family businesses help shape the economic future of Europe. The best tribute to Ukrainian entrepreneurial courage will be a future in which these companies are known not for what they survived, but for what they went on to build.