He helped Canadian-Ukrainian businesses get out of Kyiv. Now he’s stuck in the city’s suburbs, dodging war

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This article was published 28/02/2022 (934 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

He has a bag packed with clothing and travel documents.

The car is parked in the driveway with a full tank of gas and a few days’ worth of food, in case they need to get out fast.

In a quaint suburb on the outskirts of Kyiv — the storied city at the heart of a catastrophic war that has enveloped Ukraine in the past week — Sviatoslav Kavetskyi is hunkered down in a small cottage with his family, ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

The town of Boyarka sits 20 kilometres from southwest Kyiv, opposite the Belarusian border from where Russian forces have approached the city. As of Monday, it had not yet been targeted by Russian forces, though Kavetskyi and his wife have been awoken repeatedly to the faint yet unnerving sound of gunfire and explosions in the distance.

“We’re hoping for the best but prepared for the worst,” the 38-year-old told the Star on Monday evening.

How did Kavetskyi get here?

Back in Toronto, he’s known within the Ukrainian-Canadian business community as a key liaison for diasporic entrepreneurs seeking business grants and opportunities across Canada. The executive director of the Canada-Ukraine Chamber of Commerce was born and raised in Lviv, Ukraine before moving to Toronto in 2016 to help Ukrainian-Canadian businesses get their start.

But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and white-collar businesses moved their office operations online, Kavetskyi seized the chance to stay with his family back home.

He became a remote worker who could easily do his job from afar.

“Because of the possibility to work anywhere in the world, it seemed like a perfectly good idea,” said Kavetskyi, who relocated from Toronto to Kyiv early in 2020.

He could not have predicted, of course, that Russian President Vladimir Putin would stage an all-out war on his country nearly two years later.

Now, he’s caught in the middle of a conflict that threatens to destroy the country he grew up in.

The chamber of commerce has more than 230 members who do business between Canada and Ukraine. The country hosts several Canadian tech companies with Ukrainian offices, as well as energy companies that have drilling projects in the country’s eastern regions.

Before the war began, Kavetskyi said he connected with several tech companies to move their operations out of Kyiv and into neighbouring countries including Slovakia, Poland and Hungary. He communicated directly with employees of Canadian companies to help them move their families out of the country.

But many have stayed put.

Zenon Potichny, president of Zhoda Petroleum, said his Toronto-based company is invested in two oil projects in Ukraine where workers have recently gone into hiding amidst nearby conflict.

Production at an oilfield in Lelyaki in central Ukraine was shut down last week as Russians tanks rolled across the patch, he said.

“It’s been a very scary time for all these workers,” Potichny said.

Though he helped others navigate their way out of the country, Kavetskyi now finds himself increasingly stuck in a war zone.

He thought about leaving Kyiv early in the conflict, but he worried the conflict would follow him west to Lviv, where the rest of his family is staying.

The nearly eight-hour journey to the western city becomes riskier by the day.

“Today it’s Kyiv that’s under attack, but maybe tomorrow it’s Lviv. So we don’t really know whether to leave,” he said.

In the buildup to the war, as the threats from Russia intensified, Kavetskyi made an assumption not unfamiliar to many of the Ukrainian citizens who chose to stay home.

The fighting, he thought, would be limited to the eastern regions of the company bordering Russia. Kyiv would be safe.

“We didn’t really think it would come to this,” he said. “We were mistaken.”

Jacob Lorinc is a Toronto-based reporter covering business for the Star. Reach him via email: jlorinc@thestar.ca