Wartime optimism

4:28 AM
October 20, 2025
Lviv, Ukraine

A cacophony of blended city-wide air raid sirens and the alert blasting from my cell phone jolted me out of my early morning slumber. My Ukrainian friends had warned me to stay prepared, so on that night, as every other, I was sleeping in my long johns and sweats with eyeglasses, slip-on loafers, hat, gloves, and winter coat close at hand. I was staying in the freshman dormitory of the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU), so I joined the lines of teenagers quietly filing out of their rooms and padding through the dark in their Crocs or slip-ons down into the enormous underground bomb shelter. Most wore heavy warm pajamas or sweats. Many carried pillows, blankets, comforters, or even yoga mats to sit on the cold stone bomb shelter floor.

UCU’s campus abuts one of the city parks of Lviv with a military academy on the other side. UCU permits the military cadets to seek safety in its bomb shelter, as previous Russian missile attacks have targeted military academies, killing dozens of young cadets. Within minutes, the cavernous space was packed, body next to body.

Silence reverberated across the minutes becoming hours underground. No talking, no hurrying, no complaining, no cell phones, no music—all made friendly but polite bomb shelter etiquette. It seemed fitting that the sole light in the shelter, tucked away as it was beneath the stunning Catholic Church at the heart of UCU’s campus, shone from a single candle on a makeshift altar.

That night, the Russians targeted their missiles beyond Lviv to bomb an electricity substation and a natural gas power plant that provide heat and light to the metro area.

In daily conversations, the Ukrainian are almost nonchalant about attacks on electricity and power: “We have plenty of candles.” “The winters are not as cold as they were when I was growing up.” The possibility of Russian missiles targeting and their water and sanitation plants cause deeper concern. There is no life without water.

Four hours later, we temporarily subterranean residents emerged from the shelter into clear skies. Cadets loitered, buying coffee in the university canteen and flirting with students. Professors and students rushed to class. It is remarkable how Ukrainian society and economy continue to function with such sleep deprivation.

And then, at 9:00 AM, everything stopped. Each loitering cadet and scurrying academic stood at attention. Traffic froze across Lviv. Over the ten days I spent across Ukraine – in cities, in the countryside, in meetings with government officials and business leaders, in classrooms with students – everything stopped every morning for a minute of silence to honor the heroes who have died defending their homeland.

At 9:01 AM, each person continued to build, protect, and engage their neighbors.

This was not the scene I had imagined when Archbishop Borys Gudziak, the Metropolitan-Archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, and I took a walk together around the lakes of the University of Notre Dame. I certainly had not anticipated on that crisp day in May 2022 that I would end up in Ukraine participating in these peculiar wartime routines. During our walk, we talked about how we collaborate with local partners to harness the dynamism of business to serve societies ravaged by war and deep poverty. That initial walk and a shared vision of dynamic post-conflict Ukrainian businesses blossomed into strong relationships with Archbishop Borys and his colleagues at UCU, in particular with Yaryna Boychuk, the Dean of UCU’s business school.

In 2023 and 2024, student teams partnered with UCU on two projects serving Ukrainian refugees in Wraclaw, Poland, to establish their own businesses. 2025 brought an opportunity to extend direct support to reconstruction efforts within wartime Ukraine.

Since May 2025, fellows of The Frontlines Institute have supported Boychuk and her team to design UCU’s own Business on the Frontlines program, sharing curriculum, methodology, approaches to collaboration with local communities, and expertise gleaned over years of working in frontlines locations. In August 2025, UCU’s business school launched its first Business on the Frontlines class within its Executive MBA program with three local projects designed to support the rebuilding of a new Ukraine. Two Frontlines Institute Fellows and I traveled to Ukraine to support this launch, splitting our time between Lviv and the surrounding area working with skilled and dedicated UCU MBA students and their local partners.

There is no doubt Ukraine represents the next great challenge of nation building. But such nation building must be based on local leadership with external accompaniment for it to be successful. It will be durable precisely because it depends on those with the most to gain and the most to offer: the Ukrainians themselves.

As I watched hundreds of Ukrainian teenagers handle sleepless hours of air raids multiple times per week with such calmness and maturity and then go on about their business of learning, dreaming, and building Ukrainian society, I realized my vision of hope following loss was an undersell. Business and social dynamism offers not only a path to restoration after conflict, but a way to build through it.

I had expected to find tremendous resilience among Ukrainians during my visit. What I had not expected to find was such optimism.