Berlin The World Bank expects Ukraine’s gross domestic product to collapse by 45 percent this year. But “it could get much worse,” warns Taras Kyrychenko. All Ukrainian ports “are closed”, he says, and the heavy industry, which is mainly located in the east of the country, is largely idle.

The entrepreneur, who moved from the capital Kyiv to the safer western Ukraine, is on the supervisory board of the logistics company Nowa Poshta and was until recently also on the supervisory bodies of the state savings bank Oschadbank and other financial institutions. So he has a good overview of the economy in his home country: And there he sees “colossal losses”.