My night train from Lviv pulls into Odesa on a Friday morning at half past six. The Pearl of the Black Sea is barely awake.
Waiting for the first cafés to open, I walk the empty streets and ask myself: why is there still business—foreign business—in a city under regular attack? Why do companies from Denmark, Germany, the USA, and Italy operate here now, during a war that could easily have emptied this city on the waterline—a city within range of Russian drones and missiles just sixty kilometers away in Crimea?
Yet, while some left, others came, and some stayed. These people run software firms, logistics centers, timber factories, and engineering bureaus. They sign contracts between air raids, drink wine during blackouts, work from their basements during missile attacks, and call it normal.
Watching them, I think of Odesa as the Wild South—reckless and enterprising at once.
I’ve come to understand what makes Odesa endure and attract people who could have an easier life elsewhere.
A safe island in the storm
Viktoriia Klimenko works for Pharmbills, a US remote workforce company that manages American clients from its Odesa office. She remembers February 2022 as a moment of panic and of opportunity.
“When the war started, lots of people lost their jobs,” she says. “Pharmbills was a safe place. We had no salary delays. Stability helps when the world gets crazy.”
Her words already hint at one answer to my question:
Foreign businesses that stayed became islands of predictability.
While local firms froze hiring and competitors fled to EU countries, Pharmbills doubled its staff. The company installed generators, built an internal bot to check employees’ safety, and paid in dollars.
“Dollar salaries became not just a benefit but a psychological anchor,” Klimenko explains. “People knew they could plan their lives. That’s rare now.”
In wartime Odesa, the dollar has become more than currency; it’s a promise that tomorrow will still exist.
Firms linked to Western partners suddenly have a recruiting advantage—not necessarily because they pay more, but because they symbolise reliability while those paying solely in hryvnia struggle with inflation and uncertainty.
So one reason they stay: stability itself has become a product to sell.
A Danish lesson in remote endurance
Akkermann Engineering & Software feels like a Danish enclave in Odesa: white walls, ceilings, and cupboards contrast with black height-adjustable tables, plenty of glass, everything adhering to strict Danish norms. The company’s founder, Thomas Sillesen, isn’t shy about his approach.
“We even measure the light to ensure it’s compliant with Danish working standards,” he says. “It has to be 400 lux coming down on the desk where you work. We don’t need to do it, but we decided to.”
Sillesen’s engineers design mechanical components for Scandinavian clients. The company headquarters moved to Odesa from Luhansk in 2014, as the war in Donbas against Russian-supported separatists was starting.
Maybe that makes Sillesen, without meaning to, a veteran of endurance.
Reflecting on what the war has taught him, Sillesen reaches further into the past, to COVID times.
“COVID trained everyone to work from home,” he explains. “Clients got used to seeing our engineers on video with fake backgrounds. They just wanted the work done. When the war came, that habit saved us.”
Sillesen’s staff, scattered from Zaporizhzhia to Lviv, now collaborate online.
“The risk is there,” Sillesen admits, speaking of air raids. “But the risk is everywhere. And the Danish government gives guarantees for companies investing in Ukraine. So it’s easier to take the chance.”
This is his answer to why he stays: not blind courage but deliberate fearlessness — the cool logic of someone who measures risk and decides it’s worth taking. What Thomas Sillesen misses most is seeing his team together. There hasn’t been a company party in three years.
“I miss that,” Sillesen says. “Just saying hi to fifty guys in the morning—gone. When the war is over, we’ll still work hybrid, but Fridays will be for pizza and beer again.”
He speaks like a man who already imagines that future, which may be the quietest reason of all to remain: staying here means believing there will be an “after.”
A German who came for freedom—and stayed
For Philipp Hasselbach, a German who founded the logistics company STEX GmbH, Odesa first appeared not as a business prospect but as a revelation.
“I saw videos from Arcadia during COVID,” he explains over coffee at a very-Odesan pastry shop with pink walls, neo-rococo-style cups, and cakes that look like art from pre-revolutionary France. “People dancing on the beach while Germany sat in silence. I thought: That’s where I want to live!”
He arrived in 2020 to enjoy life, but soon decided he couldn’t just hang around in the nightclubs of Arcadia—Odesa’s beach and nightlife district—doing nothing meaningful. So he rented a small office, posted job announcements, and waited to see what would happen. What happened: he never left, even after the invasion.
“I take Putin’s war personally,” Philipp says. “If he wants me gone, then I stay.”
That sentence captures the Wild South spirit: a blend of defiance, irony, and unshakable instinct for survival.
STEX ships urgent parcels across Europe using the same model as Pharmbills or Akkermann: clients abroad, office staffed with young multilingual Ukrainians here. Still, even with the internet and phones, connections to the outside world matter for organizing daily life.
“Odesa forces you to improvise,” Philipp explains calmly. “That’s not failure—that’s survival culture.”
In his case, improvisation has become a business method. The risks that scare off others are what make his company competitive: cheaper staff and offices, less bureaucracy and regulations, and a city that just doesn’t let one go.
The city that works when logic says it shouldn’t
At the harbor, cranes stand mostly idle. Some ships dare to cross the perilous waters from the Dardanelles to Odesa, but not many—the port remains a regular target for Russian attacks. The night before I met with Philipp, there were missile strikes.
“I don’t know what it was,” the Odesa veteran sounds slightly shaken, “but I don’t remember seeing or hearing such a bang before.”
I hear nothing. The thick walls of my downtown Airbnb turn the explosion into silence. It’s an unsettling kind of safety—the illusion of distance where none exists. When I step outside the next morning, the city is already humming quietly, as if the night had been erased.
The café Foundation—one of the best, according to many Odessites—opens at eight. As I enter to drink tea in the place everyone else seems to visit for its impressive selection of coffee, I notice a group of fashionable youth gathered here. The up-and-coming youngsters wear sporty clothes, but it looks like they do so not to get sweaty but to look cool. They’re bent over iPhones or tablets, plotting how to take over the world—with IT startups.
Against all odds, Odesa remains an IT hub: Odessites won’t wait for safety to return before life resumes.
I discuss this with my friend Michael Löffler, who runs a small AI software firm, OCCAM. Originally from Bavaria, Germany, he has lived in Odesa since 2005 and fondly calls the city’s lifestyle an “organized disarray.”
“We’re disconnected from the Ukrainian economy a bit,” he confirms Philipp’s assessment, “but we live here and see how things develop. There’s still business—just in a different shape. You fix one problem, another appears, and somehow it balances out.”
Although understanding the plight of many ordinary Ukrainians, Michael isn’t too worried about Odesa’s economic prospects in the grand scheme of things. He’s been following real estate prices for years. “And they haven’t fallen far as much as one might imagine.” Indeed, comparing prices across Ukrainian cities, Odesa holds the middle: a theoretical one-bedroom apartment costs $65,000 in Kyiv, $14,000 in Kherson, and $44,000 in Odesa.
That, too, is part of the answer. Investors and residents alike sense that Odesa bends but doesn’t break.
Jörg Maus, another German (yes, there are quite a few of them here!) whose forestry company Biosol continues to export timber products, puts the situation more bluntly: “People realized nobody would save them. You keep working, or you close. Yes, there are days when you think it’s impossible to continue, but then you find a way.”
The employment situation has gotten harder, Jörg admits. Young men are afraid to leave their homes, worried about conscription. “Good workers are very difficult to find,” he says. “Most people try to find jobs where they can work from home. It’s much stronger now than people getting out.”
Despite the difficulties, he’s stayed. Like the others, he’s invested years here, built relationships, and found people he can trust.
“If you find someone who’s correct, trustworthy, wants to think in a European-oriented way—then definitely, it has perspective.”
Trust. That’s another word that keeps returning in these conversations. Those who stay do so because they have built something personal: companies, friendships, loyalties, or even families that can’t be moved just like that to Warsaw, Copenhagen, or Vienna. The war tests those ties daily, and so far, they hold.
What foreign companies mean to Odessites
Jörg sees the challenge from the employer’s side—finding workers who can and will show up. But from the worker’s perspective, Viktoriia Klimenko at Pharmbills explains what having foreign companies here actually means for young Odessites.
Yes, dollar salaries provide stability—that psychological anchor she mentioned earlier. But the deeper value lies in what the city lacks: Odesa doesn’t have many big corporations or white-collar jobs.
“In schools in Odesa, English is the first foreign language everyone learns,” she explains. “So naturally, young professionals look for English-speaking companies where they can use this skill.”
Foreign employers have quietly become a bridge between Odesa and the wider world. They bring not just money but a different rhythm: deadlines, video calls, performance reviews—the small rituals of global normality that remind people what ordinary life used to feel like.
For people at the beginning of their careers who want to understand how the global economy works, foreign companies offer something local firms often can’t. When Viktoriia interviews someone with experience at another foreign company, she knows that person already understands international corporate processes and mentality—a rare commodity in a city where most work is purely local.
Early in the war, hiring was easier—local companies closed and people came to Pharmbills for stability. But the ongoing challenge is different. “Lots of good professionals have moved to other countries,” Viktoriia says.
“Whoever had good English and could move abroad tried to build their lives there.”
Pharmbills adapted by opening an academy—free online courses where people learn corporate skills and industry-specific terminology. People can test whether they actually want this kind of work before committing.
The office itself has transformed. During severe blackouts, every chair was occupied—people came because the office had generators. The company provided power banks, rented houses in western Ukraine during the worst periods, and allowed employees to work remotely from safer locations or even from other countries.
As for daily life in Odesa? Viktoriia has adjusted like everyone else. “It’s absolutely normal to have coffee in the morning after a sleepless night during an attack, then get some nice lunch, and after that, get the work done.”
Viktoriia adds that there’s a joke among residents:
“During the day Odesa is Saint-Tropez—during the night it’s Afghanistan.”
What she describes isn’t denial but adaptation. The war has turned survival into a routine. For Odesans working with foreign companies, normality—even if partial or lasting only a few hours between air-raid sirens—is not an illusion; it’s a decision.
“But Ukrainians adjust well to whatever is happening,” Viktoriia concludes. “We’ve learned how to live in these circumstances.”
Beyond resilience
Odesa isn’t simply enduring—it’s improvising its way forward, refining a new logic of motion that is both pragmatic and absurd. In Odesa, disorder isn’t an obstacle; it’s a management style.
Every conversation I’ve had circles back to the same paradox: people stay not because it’s safe, but because it feels alive.
A city that should be paralyzed by fear runs on caffeine, improvisation, and the stubborn belief that everyday life must continue. It works not because logic says it should, but because people have decided it must. The Wild South — that’s how I keep thinking of Odesa. A place that shouldn’t work, yet somehow does.
Maybe that’s the answer I was looking for. They stay because Odesa, even under fire, offers something rarer than safety: a sense of meaning. It’s the one place where ordinary acts—running a meeting, delivering a parcel, fixing a power line—feel like defiance itself.
Odesa proves that normality itself can be an act of rebellion.
This is Chapter I of a series exploring how Odesa’s business community navigates Europe’s largest war since World War II. Coming up: Odesa’s population just turned over by half. New people, old debates, and the question no one wants to ask: What kind of city emerges from this?
