‘We’re not getting paid’: the Kyiv businesses trying to reopen
Sixteen days after Russia invaded Ukraine, life in the capital is far from ordinary. Kyiv is a city under siege. Half of its inhabitants have left. Russian tanks and armoured vehicles are edging ever closer from the north and west, with some units just nine miles away. There are sandbags and tank traps.
And yet there were tentative signs on Friday that those who remained were seeking to return to a kind of normality, even as war raged around them. In a Facebook post, Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, said it was time for the country’s economy to restart. Those displaced by Russian bombing should try to find jobs, he boldly suggested.
Over in Observatorna Street in central Kyiv, a 15-minute walk from the landmark St Sophia’s Cathedral, a group of Kyiv hipsters were heeding the minister’s call. City hairdressers had staged a muted reopening. There were few customers for now. The street outside was mostly deserted. And you needed an appointment.
“We only take people through word of mouth at the moment,” said Yulia Stets, the salon’s lead stylist and director. The business opened in October, soon after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, began amassing troops on Ukraine’s borders. The salon slotted right into Kyiv’s burgeoning youth scene, so hip that it was widely referred to as the “new Berlin”.
Stets said she returned to work two days ago. So far they had cut the hair of seven people. Most of the staff have exited Kyiv but there were so many hairdressers without work that Stets proposed the salon become a cooperative. “We’re not getting paid,” she said. “Our last salary is all we have. People have to find a way to start working again.”
Air-raid sirens go off every few hours in Kyiv. The city centre has not been
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