Volt bought the Zavalievsky graphite mine, near Ukraine’s border with Moldova, for $US7.6 million in mid-2021 with plans to scale up production but the invasion has kept the mine from operating this year.

“Because it’s a rural environment, there’s really no military targets,” managing director Trevor Matthews said.

One of my developers said to me: ‘it’s OK, I’m coding by day and making Bandera smoothies [Molotov cocktails] at night’.

Lqd Technology founder Hugh Simpson

“Nevertheless from our perspective sitting here in Australia, and not really being able to assess a military environment where you have hostilities under way, you just adopt a safety-first approach and suspend operations.”

The company continues to pay wages to its 200 Ukrainian workers and Matthews checks in daily with its managers, normally based in Kyiv and now in Lviv.

He said the company considered a dispute between Russia and Ukraine a risk before buying the mine, but the scale of the invasion “took everybody by surprise”.

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“There’s always some element of political risk,” Matthews said. “It’s severely disrupting our plans in Ukraine, but we hold strong hopes we will come out of this and be able to restart the business, and even develop it further over time.”

Lqd Technology is turning attention to recovery, questioning what the economic environment will be after an eventual end to the war.

“The big one there is how many IT developers remain in Ukraine when the martial law is lifted versus how many international clients are going to want to come and invest in Ukraine?” Simpson said.

“The security situation around our main hub Kyiv is changing, we’re shifting to a recovery phase of how do we keep the business going? How do we reduce the risk from cyberattack?”

He plans to return to Kyiv in coming weeks and described the business as “on life support” but has hopes for it to continue.

“For many of those who are not working directly for international clients, who are still paying, we have had to look at economic measures with our main focus to keep Ukrainians employed even if they’re not working.”

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