The mood has shifted on the war in Ukraine. Just ask the businessmen who sipped cocktails and toasted deals one recent evening at a party outside a hip dockside cafe.
The party followed a conference in Gdansk, Poland, on the postwar reconstruction of Ukraine. Previous gatherings revolved around donor assistance. This year, the emphasis was private investment — a view of Ukraine not as a battered victim but as a large postwar market on a path to European Union membership.
The change was a sign of a more upbeat assessment among diplomats, military analysts and businessmen of Kyiv’s prospects in the war. The front line is still a crucible of drone-fueled violence, and Russian missiles continue to streak into Ukrainian cities. But Russia’s advances have been mostly halted, and Ukraine is hitting back regularly, including with strikes on Moscow.
The overarching pitch at the conference was to put money into Ukraine even as it remains at war. Any such investment is a wager that Ukraine will deny Russia its broad ambitions in the conflict and remain an independent state.
Among the 7,500 attendees was Jeremy Lewin, the State Department’s under secretary for foreign assistance and humanitarian affairs. In a speech, he said this was the moment to “invest in the dip” in Ukraine — to buy in now, when prices are lower, and profit as the country rises.
The conference produced 160 agreements that netted Ukraine about $11 billion in private investment and aid, according to Yuliia Svyrydenko, who until last week was Ukraine’s prime minister.
The Export-Import Bank of the United States announced an up to $300 million line of credit for Naftogaz, Ukraine’s state oil and gas company, to buy American construction equipment and oil industry services.
For now, Ukraine’s economy is propped up by international aid. But the country’s long-term prospects are potentially lucrative. Ukraine holds one of Europe’s largest known reserves of natural gas, with an estimated value of about $300 billion.
“People are looking at serious business opportunities” in Ukraine, said Duncan Nightingale, the chairman of the board of Naftogaz. The forum buzzed with “a very high level of optimism,” he said.
Ukraine still faces battlefield challenges, including a slow but steady Russian advance in the Donbas region in the east, and there is little indication that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia plans to stop fighting anytime soon. Overnight Sunday, Russia fired at least 41 missiles, mostly aimed at Kyiv, Ukraine’s Air Force said. And on the Ukrainian side, the dim of a popular defense minister has shaken confidence in the country’s so far successful drone war strategies.
Still, some analysts say the war has turned in Ukraine’s favor, a shift more marked than any since the conflict’s first months, when Russia endured a series of defeats.
Ukraine is fielding a new class of video-guided midrange drones that reach across the Russian-held land corridor connecting occupied Crimea to Russia. Kyiv is routinely striking both supply lines into Crimea and oil refineries deep inside Russia, trying to increase pressure on Moscow to negotiate a settlement.
President Trump, long a skeptic of Ukraine’s chances against Russia, has taken note. “He’s doing pretty well,” Mr. Trump said last month of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
A willingness to put money into the country is a sign of the shifting sentiment.
Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, and his wife, Wendy Schmidt, have invested in Kyiv real estate. The couple bought shares in commercial real estate funds that hold shopping malls managed by a Ukrainian investment firm.
The value of the shares was not disclosed, but Forbes estimated the stake at $55 million to $70 million. Mr. Schmidt is also an investor in Ukrainian drone companies that have helped shift the tide of the war.
At the gathering in Gdansk in June, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the largest institutional investor in Ukraine, announced more than 500 million euros, or $570 million, in new funding. The bank has invested about 10 billion euros since the full-scale invasion in 2022.
The bank sees an opportunity in one of Russia’s most damaging tactics: its targeting of Ukraine’s coal-fired electrical generating plants. The bank has a mandate to invest in carbon-free energy, which dovetails with Kyiv’s strategy of building solar and wind farms that are harder to blow up.
“There was a forced decarbonization in Ukraine,” said the bank’s vice president for banking, Matteo Patrone.
Still, new direct foreign investment has been limited. Companies that operated in Ukraine before the invasion, including McDonald’s and Nestle, have expanded as it became clear that Russia would not overrun the country. But companies not already present have mostly held back, said Andy Hunder, the head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine.
At the party, businessmen and diplomats nursed Aperol spritzes in the ethereal twilight of midsummer on the Baltic Sea.
The choice of venue was telling. It was at this port where the liberation of Central and Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union began with the Solidarity movement of dock workers organized by Lech Walesa in the 1980s.
Now, the former Lenin Shipyard is a gentrifying zone of condominiums, art galleries and coffee shops. The gritty docks have been transformed through Poland’s post-Communist economic boom — a path Ukrainian officials say they hope to emulate after the war.
