Ukrainian entrepreneur living in Harrogate hopes to promote positive perceptions of home country

Fedir Haidai, a businessman from near Kyiv, is living with his wife and three-year-old son with a sponsor family in Harrogate.

Earlier this month, he came to public attention after the media learnt he has set up three business ventures since coming to the UK.

He says being in the limelight is something he never expected but something he hopes to use to help people back in Ukraine.

“It’s my first experience of this,” he tells The Yorkshire Post. “I’m not a public man, and I never was a public man, but it’s a good way for me to show everyone that I’m from Ukraine, and we are really good people from Ukraine.

“We need this support and we need to support our country, because we still have a lot of problems there, we still have a war - and if people forget about the war in Ukraine, it’s not good for our country.”

Fedir was on a four-day business trip in Kherson in February when one by one, his meetings for the day began to fall through.

When he asked why they had cancelled, his partners and clients told him they didn’t know what would happen tomorrow, but they thought war would soon begin.

It was around then that Fedir received a call from his friend, a refugee of the 2014 Crimean Annexation with connections still close to the Russian border.

He told Fedir that near the Ukrainian border, Russian military vehicles were stationed, and had not set up their equipment to stay overnight.

Fedir rang his wife, Katya, and told her to collect their son, Misha, and meet at the border of Moldova. He told Katya to bring clothes for a week, and that although he was sure nothing would happen, it was better to go to Moldova for now.

The family met on the Moldovan border around 5am, on Thursday, February 24, and within a few hours, the invasion had begun. The news came to the family via their phones, as messages began to come in from friends back home.

“We stopped in the car and looked through these messages and cried,” says Fedir. “We heard what happened from people in our village when someone saw a fire near the airport in Kyiv. We called our parents, but nobody thought in Ukraine that this could be. It was an unbelievable situation.”

The family are now in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, living with a sponsor family as part of the government’s scheme to house Ukrainian refugees. Back home in Ukraine, Fedir was in charge of two businesses, one of which would import pipes from Russia and Belarus for use in central heating.

Although he worked as an importer while in Ukraine, his desire was to help the Ukrainian economy, something he now hopes to be able to do from the UK. “I wanted to grow Ukrainian manufacturing,” he says, “but I bought products from other countries, so the money went out to other countries, and I thought ‘I must be an exporter’. I thought that to be an importer in the UK, is like being an exporter from Ukraine, and I can use all my experience to work here and help the Ukrainian economy.”

To achieve this, Fedir has set up three new business ventures after getting advice from the local branch of the Institute of Directors. One of his businesses will import high quality sunflower oil from Ukraine for use in catering and cooking, while another will import vodka from a Lviv-based company with history dating back to 1783.

Through his third business, Fedir hopes to take advantage of Ukraine’s growing workforce of young IT professionals, giving them a chance to work in the UK. Fedir’s wife also intends to help with this business, a change she has had to make since leaving behind her own beauty salon business in Kyiv.

Fedir also talks fondly of the warmth with which his family has been received in Harrogate, which he notes is now home to around 100 Ukrainian refugees.

“I think Harrogate is a special place,” he says.

“I was in different cities for a month, and I think Harrogate is one of the best places to live, to work, and to feel myself. It’s so easy to speak with people, I thought that because I’m a refugee they would maybe not want to speak with me or hear my problems, but all of them want to know how you are.”

Despite his gratitude, he admits being away from Ukraine is hard. “Our parents have cried every time we spoke on WhatsApp and when they see my son, they say he’s growing so fast.”