Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second-most-populous city and home to its thriving $6.8 billion tech sector. In September 2021, it housed more than 500 tech companies, and the industry had grown more than 50% in two years.
Today, Kharkiv, a city of 1.5 million people just 45km (25 mi) from the Russian border, is also among the most vulnerable as Russia bears down on the country. Downtown buildings stand in piles of rubble after Russian airstrikes, and thousands have fled. By mid-February, many tech companies were already evacuating their workers from Ukraine as Russia prepared to invade. The Israeli website builder Wix offered to evacuate 1,000 of its Ukrainian staff and their families to Turkey. Cimpress, which sells customized goods, made a similar offer to its 500 IT workers in Ukraine, as did the edtech firm Canvas.
With Russia stepping up its attacks against civilians in Ukraine’s biggest tech hub, the IT sector may never come back. “If the war ended tomorrow, most people would be happy to go back,” says Vlad Panchenko, CEO of the Ukrainian metaverse developer DMarket, who spoke from Montenegro after chartering a plane to fly nearly all of his 100 employees from Kyiv on Feb. 18. “But if Russia wins the war and invades the whole country, no one will come back. I’ve seen what Russia did in the eastern Ukrainian regions and in Crimea as well. You can’t do any business over there. It’s always scorched earth.”
Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.
Originally published on Quartz : Original article