Iryna Levkivska is group CFO for Kovalska, an Ukrainian construction materials manufacturer, builder, and property developer. The company is based in Kyiv, where Levkivska lives with her husband and 6-year-old son. She and her family fled to western Ukraine as the war started, but returned to Kyiv three months later and have remained in the Ukrainian capital since.

Levkivska became CFO of Kovalska in 2020; the company had embarked on a strategic transformation just as the war started.

*This interview has been edited for clarity.

How prepared was your company for the war and what were those first days like?

When everything started that night, we already had a small plan in case of war. First of all, three people could control all our accounts and two people could make payments. So we had our treasury department ready.

But all other departments were not at all ready for the war. All operations stopped. People started running from here [Kyiv] to other regions, and for a while, we lost control of everyone.

The company was not ready, to be honest. It wasn’t ready for the war at all, the only process that was ready was treasury. We have some connections in the government, and even there, people were not ready for the bad period.

How did the war affect your team?

We really started losing highly qualified people. For example, the tax manager from my team went to [fight in the] war. He didn’t have any military background, but was just an ordinary, strong young man.

The accounting [team] was a problem. For example, 50% of our accounting team are women and all of them left Ukraine.

We had one month to find our people, another two months to understand how we operate the business and another two months just to give people support. After that half of the year, we understood that we must make some decisions because EBITDA was negative, cash flow was negative.

The biggest problem is people who have left Ukraine. When you live somewhere for three months, four months, you start looking for new opportunities, because you understand the [war] situation will be for a long time. Continue reading here.—DA

Roman Kozyr is a fractional CFO and manager of the advisory service department at Baker Tilly Ukraine and head of finance for United for Ukraine, a nonprofit organization helping distribute funds to Ukrainian businesses. He lives and works in Kyiv.

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Where were you when the war started?

I was in Kyiv with my family. The beginning of the war was a half hour before I was on my way to take my daughter to school. On that first day, we moved to the central part of Ukraine, to my hometown. It was a safe place for my family. I returned to Kyiv. I didn’t know what was happening—and this might be an emotional part—but I thought I should be with my neighbors, my colleagues.

We had small groups of guys who were going to protect, to do something. That first week, we collected infrastructure to stop heavy machines. My key responsibility was to find fuel from the petrol station and to find beer bottles to make Molotov cocktails. We prepared thousands of those Molotov cocktails just to protect ourselves. We took those to the checkpoints. Those were our two tasks at the beginning.

How did your business prepare for the war?

At the beginning of the year, during our budgeting process, we definitely placed reserves. Every well-structured, predictable company adds this reserve amount of cash. The best practice was to have two to three months of reserves to cover operational expenses without any cash income or revenue stream. This was our basic plan. We tried to keep calm and not panic but…we predicted something could happen. That’s why we added that amount.

We also created an emergency plan…where we collected documents from the accounting department and IT [checked] the settings of the IT structure to make sure that we were not on a server in Russia. It was not perfect. In the beginning, this emergency plan didn’t work. Everything that was happening was a different, strange situation and it was difficult to predict.

What does the forecasting and budgeting process look like as the war progresses?

This is a tricky question because we can only forecast for one day. Continue reading here.—DA

When Russia invaded Ukraine on the morning of February 24, 2022, thousands fled to neighboring countries to ensure their safety, and finance professionals were no exception. Now, the war-torn country is facing a shortage of finance talent, which is sorely needed to revive and sustain the economy, several Ukrainian finance leaders told CFO Brew.

Groups such as the CFO Club of Ukraine and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) have become vital for finance leaders to stay connected in Ukraine, where jobs and recommendations are shared on Telegram CFO groups often, Denys Shchur, regional development manager for Ukraine and the Baltics at ACCA, told CFO Brew. ACCA offered free 2022 membership to members in Ukraine, even reimbursing those who had already paid. In 2023, they are offering reduced membership fees.

“Currently, I even see that there is even a lack of financial people in Ukraine,” Shchur said, and while most men are unable to leave the country due to martial law, many Ukrainian finance leaders moved to Western Europe and settled in.

This has created a gap in the workforce, Shchur said, “when their employers found out how to work on the new normality—let’s call it normality—[and] the new circumstances, they could not recruit them back because they were already working for some [other] European finance people.”

Over the long term, the war is creating a current and future gender imbalance in the Ukrainian finance workforce. Iryna Levkivska, group CFO for Kovalska, told CFO Brew that around 50% of its accounting team was women, but many have now escaped the country with their children and looked for jobs elsewhere.

However, this has opened a window of opportunity for younger talent, who have come back to Ukraine and are signing up for ACCA classes, Shchur said. He added that they were surprised by the number of students who have stayed and are eager to gain finance knowledge. Continue reading here.—KT, DA

Stat: 60,000–70,000. That’s the estimated number of Russians killed in combat or missing in action during the war in Ukraine, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That’s likely more than the total number of Russians killed in all its conflicts since World War II, combined. (The Hill)

Quote: “We are calling on all businesses to come to Ukraine and to leave the Russian market. American business has every opportunity to take a leadership position both in the reconstruction of the Ukraine economy and infrastructure.”—Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, urging US companies to invest in the war-torn country in a speech this week to the National Association of Manufacturers. (Axios)

Read: More business leaders speak about the challenges of running a company in Ukraine over the past year. (Harvard Business Review)