Hello everyone and welcome to this E-Sype podcast conversation.

My name is Fredo Kerritson and I'm very pleased to be joined today by Maria Repko, a colleague in the world of think times.

Maria is the executive director at the Center for Economic Strategy, a Kiev-based research organization who has been working to achieve

institutional reform and improved economic performance in Ukraine since 2015.

Before joining the center, Maria worked in the investment sector for about 10 years,

including a position as Director of Analysis at Empire State Capital Partners. Maria, welcome to the

podcast. Hi, it's nice to be here with you. So I want us to start this conversation talking

about the Ukrainian economy during the war.

Over here, we have heard a lot of reporting in the media about the war in its development,

the casualties, the destruction of cities, schools, roads, bridges and so on.

But we have not heard that much about the economy and what the situation is like. So can we start

there, Maria? How badly is the economy affected by the war? How much has the economy dropped and what

is the scale of the economic destruction? Yeah, Frederick, the thing is that the statistics

on economy is being published with really big lag and we don't have so much

data as we used to have before the war. So from time to time, we just have to make an assumptions.

We saw in March a very big GDP decline. I think the economy lost about 50%. And the hit was really, really hard.

In April and May, economy started to rebound a little bit. So businesses started to open

if we had about 60% of businesses closing their activities in February and March. in April and May, already like something about

20% of them already started working again. So some companies have relocated their assets and

their personnel from the territories where currently it's not safe to proceed with any activities.

And they restarted their production

in Western Ukraine. However, the forecast is not clear at the moment, and it's not good as well,

...