The Network Nobody Planned

September 2022, an education conference in London. A woman from Kharkiv who, six months earlier, ran her own language school is asked what she does. Her answer is short: "I'm a refugee without a business."

A few years later, her company is registered in the UK, her staff are in Ukraine and her students are spread across Europe. On its own, that is one person's story. But there are thousands like it, and taken together they reveal something you cannot see up close: a new web of connections between Ukraine and the rest of the world. Nobody planned it. Yet it may turn out to be one of the most valuable resources Ukraine's economy has for the years ahead, if it can be kept alive.

What Was Lost, and What Remained: Ukrainian Business Connections

War destroys. It wipes out factories, shops and jobs, along with business relationships that took years to build. In the weeks after February 2022, a very large number of Ukrainian entrepreneurs left the country: not gradually, the way people usually move for work, but all at once, with no plan, and to many different countries. Established businesses and international business connections that had taken years to develop were disrupted almost overnight. For Ukraine's economy this was an enormous loss, and it should not be played down.

But people took something with them: experience of running a business in Ukraine, knowledge of the Ukrainian market, and contacts with partners back home. In their new countries they could not simply carry on where they had left off. They had to rebuild clients, partners and communities from the ground up. In British cities there were hardly any Ukrainian business communities at the time, so the entrepreneurs built their own entrepreneurial ecosystems, creating networks of peers, clients and potential partners.

We spent several years studying this process in the UK, through a university programme for these entrepreneurs and sixteen in-depth interviews. Our conclusion was that the most important thing happening is not visible at the level of the individual. It becomes visible at the level of the connections between people and organisations.

Cross-Border Business: Working Across Two Economic Systems

Every economy runs on its own rules. Not just laws, but unwritten habits: how deals get done, who is trusted, how banks, universities, regulators and large companies actually work. Someone who grew up inside one system usually finds another hard to read. That is a large part of why entering a new market is so slow and so costly.

Ukrainian entrepreneurs who settled in Britain, Germany, Poland and elsewhere are gradually becoming insiders in two systems at once, creating new opportunities for cross-border business. They still understand how business works in Ukraine and they still know people there. Now they also know how a British bank operates, how to get a product through European certification, and how to talk to a university or an investor. One woman in our study had spent eight years in Ukraine with no international connections at all. Today she moves through international events from Davos and Brussels to Paris, Cannes and Düsseldorf.

Before the war, people with a foothold in both systems were few. Now there are thousands, spread across dozens of countries. This is the change that is easiest to miss. What matters is not how many Ukrainians live abroad, but how many doors Ukraine now holds the keys to.

From Personal Contacts to International Business Connections

At first these connections are personal: someone met at a conference, a client recommended by another Ukrainian, a partner found through a WhatsApp group. But they quickly grow into something else: links between organisations.

A Ukrainian maker of a medical device is taking it through European certification and planning a hybrid production model in which Ukrainian manufacturing serves the European market. A London analytics firm works for major Ukrainian companies, including some of the country's largest, bringing them expertise that is hard to find at home. UK-registered IT firms deliver projects for British and American corporations using teams based in Ukraine. A Ukrainian cosmetics producer reaches European distributors through someone who knows both markets. And the programme through which we met many of these entrepreneurs is itself a new tie, between a British university and a Ukrainian business community, that did not exist before 2022.

Crucially, these ties run both ways. The familiar image of a diaspora is people abroad sending money home. This is different. The world gains access to Ukrainian producers, specialists and teams, while Ukraine gains access to global markets, capital, knowledge and new opportunities to strengthen Ukraine's international trade. Many British companies founded by Ukrainians depend on Ukrainian clients and staff to stay in business.

Put all these ties together and you get what we call a distributed reconstruction infrastructure: a network of people and organisations, across many countries and sectors, oriented towards the future of Ukraine's economy. No one runs it, but it already exists.

Why Entrepreneurial Ecosystems Cannot Be Built to Order

Governments and international bodies have spent years trying to build bridges like these: trade missions, exchange programmes, business forums. That work matters, but it is slow. Trust between organisations in different countries usually takes decades to form.

Here it formed in a few years, for two reasons. The first is timing. Thousands of entrepreneurs arrived in new countries at almost the same moment and built their communities together, under the same pressure. A network formed that way is denser and more focused than one that grows slowly over time.

The second is a shift in how these people see themselves. Having lost every familiar anchor, many stopped thinking of themselves as refugees, or simply as local business owners, and began to see themselves as Ukrainian entrepreneurs who work between countries. The future of Ukraine's economy became part of their own sense of purpose. That is why the network faces towards Ukraine rather than dissolving into its host countries. Tellingly, the person in our study for whom this was least true had lived in Britain long before the war. His anchors stayed in place, and he never began building ties back to Ukraine.

Cross-Border Business Payments: A Bridge with No Road

It would seem the resource is already there, waiting to be used. But this is where the story takes its most important turn.

Go back to the woman from Kharkiv. She has a British company, staff in Ukraine and students across Europe. All that remains is the most basic thing any business owner does: pay her people. And that is where everything stalls. One payment service after another blocks or restricts cross-border business payments to Ukrainian accounts, making it harder for entrepreneurs to pay staff and sustain international operations. The paperwork grows so tangled that she turns to an AI assistant just to complete a routine payment. In her words, people are ready to pay taxes, but they cannot receive the money.

Hers is not an isolated case. Because Ukraine is officially classed as a high-risk country, banks treat any Ukrainian connection with suspicion, and the longer the war goes on, the more nervous they become. The people we spoke to described closed accounts and legitimate payments wrongly flagged as fraud.

The problem does not sit inside Britain, nor inside Ukraine. It sits between them, in cross-border business banking, where two sets of rules meet and neither was designed for this situation. No individual entrepreneur can solve it.
So a network capable of linking Ukraine's economy to the global one works only in part. Several people told us they would hire staff in Ukraine if they could grow. The connections are there. The channels for money and work to flow through them are not.

The bridge has been built. There is no road across it.

Ukraine Economic Reconstruction: The Task Ahead

When people talk about Ukrainians abroad, one question tends to dominate: how do we bring them home? It is an important question. But it rests on an assumption that people can only help their country's economy while physically living there.

What we saw points elsewhere. These entrepreneurs have already become intermediaries between Ukraine and the global economy: between Ukrainian companies and European markets, between Ukrainian specialists and international corporations, between Ukraine's business community and universities abroad. Other countries spend years building ties like these on purpose. Ukraine has acquired them as an unexpected resource, at a very heavy price.

The task, then, is not to let this resource dissolve, but to ensure that once the war is over, it supports Ukraine's economic reconstruction and integration into the global economy. The network already exists. It will not last forever, though. If the bridges stay without roads for too long, people will gradually turn their energy to the countries they now live in.

After the war, perhaps the question that matters most will not be how many people came back. It will be how many doors to the world remained open to Ukraine.

This essay draws on sixteen interviews with Ukrainian entrepreneurs who moved to the UK after February 2022, and on questionnaire data from a UCL School of Management programme for displaced Ukrainian entrepreneurs (ethics approval SM LREC 2025-1045-949). Participants are described by role rather than name.

Note on AI use: author to complete, e.g. "An AI assistant was used to help adapt the author's research manuscript into a shorter essay for a general audience. All arguments, findings and interpretations are the author's own."