It is the first question almost every brokerage asks about staff in Ukraine, and it should be. If you are putting part of your operation in another country, you need to know what happens on the bad days, not the average ones.
The people behind Nova opened their first office in Ukraine in 2015 and kept it running through the start of the full-scale invasion and for three years after. So this is written from inside the question rather than from a brochure. It is also meant to be useful whoever you end up hiring: these are the questions to put to any Ukrainian staffing partner, us included, and what a good answer sounds like.
Start with geography, not reassurance
“Ukraine” is a large country, and the day-to-day picture differs a great deal between regions. Ask which cities the team works from, how many separate sites there are, and whether your seat could be moved from one to another if it had to be.
One office in one city is a single point of failure, however well it is run. Two sites in different cities means a bad week in one place is a reduced week, not a dark one.
Power
Grid outages, scheduled and unscheduled, have been part of working life in Ukraine for long stretches of the war. The question is not whether the power goes off but what keeps the desk working when it does, and for how long.
- Short gaps are covered by battery backup. Ask what it actually runs: a workstation on battery with a dead router is not coverage.
- Long gaps need a generator or equivalent. Ask whether it has been run at full working load, during a real shift, rather than just installed.
- Everything in the chain has to stay up together: the computer, the network equipment and whatever carries the calls.
Internet
Ask for two connections from different providers, ideally over different technologies, so one failure cannot take out both. Long power cuts can degrade mobile networks too, so “we have a phone hotspot” is a weaker answer than it sounds.
Then ask the practical follow-up: when the connection switches over, does the call survive? A carrier negotiation dropped halfway through is the real cost of a flaky line, and it is worth knowing whether anyone has tested it.
Air raid alerts
This is the question vendors are least comfortable with, which is exactly why to ask it. Alerts happen, and some of them will fall during your shift. Ask what the procedure is: where people go, whether work continues from there, how long a seat is typically unattended, and, most important, who watches your loads in the meantime and how you are told.
A good answer is specific and slightly boring. A bad answer is “it’s rarely an issue”.
Call-ups and departures
Men of conscription age can be called up for military service. That is a real staffing risk, and no honest vendor will promise it away. What a vendor can do is make sure no single person is a single point of failure on your account.
That means a cross-trained colleague who already knows your customers, a process written down well enough that someone else can run it tomorrow, and a replacement commitment that costs the vendor rather than you. The useful question is simple: how many people on your side could run my account tomorrow morning?
The home fallback
If an office is unusable for a day, can your person work from home? “They can work remotely” is not the same answer as “their home setup is already prepared, has backup power, and has been tested on your systems”. Only the second one helps you at short notice.
Put it in the agreement
Continuity should be written down, not just discussed: how absence is covered, how quickly a seat is restored, how and when you are told that something has happened, and that replacing a person is not a new fee. If a vendor will not commit a sentence to it, weigh that accordingly.
How we answer it
Our teams work from two cities, Lviv and Khmelnytskyi. Each office has backup power and redundant internet, every person has a prepared home setup to switch to, and accounts carry cross-trained cover so one person being offline does not stop your work. On the scoping call we walk through what would specifically happen on your account in a bad week, rather than asking you to take any of this on trust.
The short version
The risk is real, and the honest response to it is redundancy rather than reassurance: more than one site, power and internet that have been tested under load, a home fallback that already works, and more than one person who knows your account. Ask specific questions and expect specific answers. A vendor who has lived through it will have them.
