“We’re planning now for the recovery”: In conversation with Ukraine’s Tourism Minister Mariana Oleskiv

Courtney Fingar, editor-in-chief of Investment Monitor

Yes. That is the final goal. We don’t know how or when it will happen. Of course, we think Crimea will be the last territory we will get back, but that is our plan.

Now Ukraine has received a lot of interest worldwide and in general it has been positive interest, but the challenge for us is to get people to see the country as a future tourism destination too. The country doesn’t look like a world destination in general for tourists right now, I get it, but for us it is important to maintain another image of Ukraine: that it is a well-developed country with a good infrastructure, with a lot of things to do, with huge tourism potential and rich culture and rich history; we want to tell that story now.

Then after the war is over, we plan to launch a campaign to attract people as a show of support for Ukraine: for people to come here to spend their money here, to meet Ukrainians and tell them: ‘Thank you for being brave, for fighting for democracy and stopping the evil terrorist state of Russia.’

We understand that after the liberation, a lot of places will be disrupted or destroyed … [but investors can assist with reconstruction].

Yes, we did a lot of that, especially the first month of war. It was important that businesses would stop investing in Russia, and they would stop any cooperation with Russia. We still focus on that because I understand that a lot of people, a lot of investors, they think that the war is going to be over and we can do business with Russia as usual. They are just trying to kind of not actively or visibly be there but still keep an interest.

As Ukrainians we understand that Russia, as it is, has no future. In the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians were trying to build some form of a free-market economy, and they could be successful in that, but they would need to go down the route of a federal republic like the US, where each state has its own rules – a  decentralisation. It can be a democratic country like that. Unfortunately, they went back to dictatorship and are trying to reincarnate the Soviet Union.

When you have a dictatorship, you can’t be sure of the future of your business, you can’t even be sure of your own safety in the country. The path Russians have chosen is very wrong, it is not going to bring them any success, and unfortunately, it is not only Vladimir Putin, because we see the whole country is just a complete collapse of values. Even if Putin is removed, the system stays the same. There will be another Putin who will just do the same. It is a threat to the whole democratic world.

Keeping any cooperation with Russia is supporting this behaviour and will just make Russia stronger, [making it more likely] it will invade other countries in the region or use nuclear weapons. Ukraine is concentrated on fighting Russia on the battlefield; the rest of the world, and each business in every industry, needs to do everything to block any possibility for this [revived Russian] empire to exist, because it would be a threat to the whole world for a long time.