Vegetables for borscht cost half what they did last year. Butter and cheese prices, after months of painful increases, are finally cooling.
For Ukrainian shoppers, November brought rare relief.
Behind the grocery store wins lies a broader achievement: Ukraine’s inflation fell to 9.3% in November, beating the central bank’s own forecast of 9.7% by year’s end, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) reported on 11 December. For a country fighting for survival while trying to join the EU, hitting economic targets matters—it signals to Western partners that Ukrainian institutions work under fire.
The harvest that saved Christmas
A traditional 12-dish Christmas Eve dinner costs 1,374 hryvnias ($32) this year—virtually unchanged from 2024. Yet, that stability is deceptive.
Ukraine’s 2025 vegetable harvest broke records, and prices for the “borscht set”—potatoes, carrots, cabbage, beets, onions—plunged by more than half. The NBU says warehouses struggled to store the unexpectedly large yields, pushing prices down further.
This windfall absorbed inflation hitting everything else.
Cooking oil jumped 27% after the sunflower harvest fell short, 11.5 million tons versus 12.8 million in 2024. Flour price 18%, squeezed mainly by energy costs from Russian strikes on gas infrastructure. Diesel also climbed as wartime logistics complicated supply chains.
Cheap vegetables covered these cracks. For now. But what happens next year if the harvest isn’t record-breaking?
The butter relief
This summer, Ukrainian butter cost 25% more than in Poland—a painful symbol for a country whose farms used to feed Europe. That gap is narrowing.
Global dairy prices have dropped 35% since last November’s peak. The NBU reports butter and cheese price increases “slowed further” in November, while weak demand and falling global prices cooled milk costs.
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EU pork flooding the Ukrainian market interrupted a long domestic price uptrend, the NBU notes—trade integration deepening even as missiles fly.
Discipline under fire
Ukraine has held its key interest rate at 15.5% all year, tight by any standard, remarkable for a wartime economy. The payoff: inflation falling from nearly 16% in May to 9.3% now, tracking toward the NBU’s 5% target by 2027.
That timeline matches European Central Bank standards.
It also contrasts sharply with Russia, where the central bank lurches between emergency hikes and surprise cuts, struggling to contain an economy distorted by war spending.
Ukraine is building the institutions it needs for EU membership while fighting for the territory to use them. November’s numbers suggest the strategy is holding—for now.
