On 25–26 June 2026, delegations from nearly 100 countries gather in Gdańsk for the Ukraine Recovery Conference. The EU Ukraine Facility commits up to €50 billion in grants and loans through 2027, with the Ukraine Investment Framework holding €9.5 billion in guarantees designed to mobilise up to €40 billion in public and private investment. The capital is real. The question Roksolana Pyrtko, CEO of two major commercial centres managing over 100,000 sq m, asks is whether the conditions required to deploy it into commercial real estate are equally in place.
The gap between capital and conditions
“The money exists. The frameworks exist. What does not yet exist, in reliable form, is the operating environment that a long-term property investor requires — predictable contract enforcement, transparent land registry, consistent planning rules. Those are not soft preconditions. They are the product itself.”
The Ukraine Facility’s own reform requirements address precisely these gaps. The sequencing question remains: institutional capital is circling, but private international capital, the kind that funds retail development, will price conditions rather than commitments.
What the wartime market actually looks like
Roksolana Pyrtko has published detailed analysis of both the office and retail segments throughout the conflict. In office, pre-war Kyiv vacancy of 11–12% and Class A rents of $25–27/sq m gave way to a market where large transactions have largely ceased and demand concentrates in 100–300 sq m units. Geographically, Lviv emerged as the primary beneficiary of eastward business relocation. In retail, approximately 67% of new openings in 2025 were Ukrainian brands — replacing international anchors and fundamentally changing leasing strategy and tenant risk profiles.
“When your anchor tenants are Ukrainian brands rather than international chains, your leasing model changes. The risk profile changes. The covenant strength changes. That requires a different kind of operator expertise — and it is not what most international investors are currently modelling.”
The energy autonomy baseline
One of the clearest market differentiators has been energy infrastructure. Roksolana Pyrtko’s early investment in generators and autonomous power systems at Roksolana Mall held vacancy at approximately 10% through the most difficult period of the conflict. The lesson for investors is direct: energy autonomy is no longer a feature, it is a fundamental due diligence question, and assets without it carry a risk premium that is difficult to price remotely.
What Gdańsk needs to deliver
Roksolana Pyrtko identifies three outcomes from URC 2026 that would materially change the investment case for Ukrainian commercial real estate: continued progress on judicial reform and contract enforceability, disbursement of the €7.2 billion in Ukraine Facility tranches planned for 2026, and visible institutional investment through EIB and national development bank frameworks.
“The real estate market does not need to be on the conference agenda. It needs the conference to deliver on rule of law and institutional finance access. If those two things move forward in the second half of 2026, capital will find the sector on its own,” says Roksolana Pyrtko.
As a practitioner who has kept over 100,000 sq m of commercial space operational throughout four years of full-scale war, Mrs Pyrtko’s assessment carries weight that purely financial analysis cannot replicate. For international investors trying to read Ukraine’s commercial property market from the outside, that ground-level expertise may be the most useful data point of all.
