Keyboard warriors

How a booming tech sector has switched to war footing in the face of Russian invasion

- Mark Sweney

‘We had a plan for when the war started,” says Bogdan Nesvit, the 30-year-old cofounder of Ukrainian tech developer Holy Water. “We relocated the female part of the team to Poland. With men not allowed to leave the country, we are all working between bomb shelters and hotels.”

Nesvit is sharing a hotel room with six of his 80 colleagues in western Ukraine. He is one of the country’s army of almost 300,000 tech workers who have embarked on an unprecedented migration to keep their firms running during the Russian invasion.

The hotel where he is based has turned its gym into a makeshift communal office space. Nesvit estimates it is being used by about 100 workers around the clock, as the relative safety of the west of Ukraine has made it the focus of relocation plans.

Nesvit’s well-rehearsed evacuation is typical of plans put into action by Ukraine’s 8,700 IT companies.