Around 300 cafés and food kiosks stopped operating or began winding down in Kyiv in March, according to Olha Nasonova, co-founder of Ukraine’s National Restaurant Association, speaking to TSN, Ukraine’s main commercial television news service. She calls it an “epidemic of closures.”
Wartime conditions produced a kiosk boom built on thin margins.
The casualties are almost entirely small street kiosks, not sit-down cafés with their own identity and clientele—and the electricity bill is the last of several things that caught up with them at once.
The sector was already in trouble before February’s commercial electricity costs doubled. Wartime conditions produced a kiosk boom built on thin margins, identical products, and the assumption that coffee sells itself.
When the electricity bill doubled, operators with no reserves simply closed.
Three forces were grinding against that assumption before the utility bill arrived: a market packed with indistinguishable competitors, customers with shrinking purchasing power, and a workforce that mobilization and emigration keep thinning.
According to Texty, the Ukrainian data journalism outlet, when the electricity bill doubled, operators with no reserves simply closed.
“Costs multiplied, footfall dropped. Minus plus minus didn’t equal plus. Then, in February, the electricity bills came in—twice as high. So they counted up the losses and decided to close,” Nasonova said.
Too many, too similar
Data from Poster, a restaurant automation platform, shows that café numbers grew by more than a third nationally during the full-scale war, even as restaurants, pubs, and other formats shrank. In Kyiv, the count more than doubled. The low entry cost made opening a kiosk look like an easy wartime bet—and for a while, it was.
“Most cafés look alike: same coffee, same chairs, same pastries. Even the names are identical.”
What the boom produced, Nasonova told Texty, was four or five near-identical operations competing on every street. “Most cafés look alike: same coffee, same chairs, same pastries. Even the names are identical.” When customers can only choose by price or convenience, margins disappear at the first cost shock.
The price shock came from both directions. Nasonova told TSN that she tracks what she calls the “Kyiv cappuccino index”: a cappuccino that cost 60 hryvnias in 2024 reached 80 hryvnias (about $1.8) by the end of 2025.
The pattern holds across western Ukraine, where Euromaidan Press tracked prices in early April.
The pattern holds across western Ukraine, where Euromaidan Press tracked prices in early April. In Lviv, a kiosk coffee runs 80–90 hryvnias on the city’s outskirts and up to 120 in the historic center—while a supermarket machine nearby charges 40–60.
In Uzhhorod, on the western border, street kiosk prices sit at 50–70 hryvnias, in a city where apartment rents already count among the highest in the country.
Kiosk owners raised prices to cover rising costs everywhere—and lost customers to supermarket coffee counters and lobby machines. “Why would someone pay 70–80 hryvnias for a cappuccino in an old kiosk with peeling walls and no chair?” Nasonova said.
A workforce that isn’t there
Ukraine’s workforce has contracted by more than a quarter since 2021 as mobilization, emigration, and casualties drain the labor pool. Help-wanted signs—waiter needed, cook needed, no experience required—are a permanent fixture on café and restaurant doors across Ukraine, from Kyiv to Lviv to Odesa.
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A kiosk that runs on one or two people cannot afford to lose even one person. Higher wages, where owners can afford them, do not solve the problem: the workers simply are not there.
Then the electricity bill arrived
Russia launched 612 targeted attacks on Ukraine’s energy facilities in 2025 alone, leaving not a single power plant undamaged; this past winter, power cuts in Kyiv lasted up to 20 hours a day.
Unlike households—whose government-regulated tariff remains frozen until at least 30 April 2026—businesses pay commercial rates that track the damaged grid’s volatile output. For operators already running without reserves, the February bill was not a crisis. It was a final calculation.
What will not survive are the kiosks that opened on a low-cost bet, never tried to stand out, and had no cushion.
According to Texty, the city’s demolition of street kiosks added pressure of its own: seven were cleared from Maidan alone in March, forcing some operators into more expensive ground-floor premises.
Nasonova expects the market to consolidate around two survivor types: authentic cafés with genuine identity and loyal customers, and budget operations at the city’s busiest locations. What will not survive are the kiosks that opened on a low-cost bet, never tried to stand out, and had no cushion when the costs of the war—wages, prices, electricity—all arrived at once.
