Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Monday the 4th of March.

And I am delighted to be in the Polish city of Poznan heading for Berlin. I'm on my way, the pretty way to the German capital for ITB. That's the

world's biggest travel event. It starts tomorrow. But ahead of it, I have been speaking to

the boss of tourism in Ukraine. Yes, this is Marianna Oleskiv,

and she has been telling me

that once the guns fall silent,

Ukraine will be back to welcome visitors once again.

Stay away for now, she says,

but she is genuinely of the opinion that tourism will be an essential part of the rebuilding of Ukraine once peace arrives.

Here's what she told me.

First of all, actually, we still have tourism, domestic tourism in Ukraine, and this is something that helps us also to cope with everything that is going on in our country.

And it's the same as we have cafes, bars, restaurants,, we have hotels open and actually during last winter

when we had blackout very often the hotels were that place where people could have food,

I don't know, charge their phones because they all had

generators and this was something like places for everybody to be safe, as we call them,

unbreakable food in Ukraine, a couple of those. And people do travel.

They travel with families, with kids, from the destinations that are less safe to a destination

that are more safe in Carpathian Mountains, western, central Ukraine.

And this is something that keeps us, our mental health being all right and being okay.

And of course, from one point it would sound why should we in general communicate and be and stay in the tourism arena, yes, and talk about tourism to Ukraine.

But we are confident that this is something that will, in the future, bring,

like help Ukrainian economic recovery.

...