# One company, two sides. Twenty million dollars invested in Ukraine, thirty million paid in Russian tax.

> Business ethics scholars once argued that firms present on both sides of a war are the ones best placed to broker peace. Ukraine is where that argument meets a full-scale invasion.

| | |
| --- | --- |
| Sector | Consumer goods |
| Places | Kyiv · Lviv · Dnipro |
| Case lead | John Katsos |
| Work package | WP2 |
| Questions | RQ3, RQ4, RQ5, RQ7 |
| Fieldwork window | Fieldwork 2026 |

## The ground

The invasion of February 2022 produced the largest wave of corporate withdrawal in modern European history, and also a long list of companies that stayed. Sanctions, consumer pressure, employee safety and the legal position of local subsidiaries pulled in different directions, and firms resolved that tension in public, under scrutiny, at speed.

## The corporate question

When the war began, the Netherlands-based consumer goods multinational in this case was running operations in both countries, with thousands of employees in each. Reported figures put its Russian revenue near a billion dollars and its Russian tax bill around thirty million, against roughly twenty million invested in Ukrainian facilities and fifteen million in aid. Those numbers sit in the same annual report.

## What we ask here

The corporate diplomacy literature makes a specific claim: that firms with a presence on both sides of a conflict have reach and standing that other actors lack. We interview staff in both operations where security allows, along with Ukrainian civil society and government contacts, and we ask what a company owes a country it is also, through taxation, helping to fight.

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URL: https://stakesproject.org/cases/ukraine/
Language: en
Updated: 2026-08-02

Supported by the Research Council of Norway, project 353416 (FRIPRO). Hosted at the Centre for Global Sustainability (GLOBE/SUM), University of Oslo, 2025 to 2029. CC BY 4.0.