When I tell people I have been buying Ukrainian real estate during the war, the reaction is almost always the same — a pause, then a careful question about whether I have thought it through. I have. This is a first-person account of why I hold the position, how I underwrite it, and what conviction looks like when the consensus is that a market should not exist at all. It is not a sales pitch. It is the reasoning, written down.
By Ruslan Averin.
The Question Everyone Asks Me First
The first question is rarely about returns. It is about safety — physical, financial, moral. "How can you invest in a country at war?" The honest answer is that the question contains a category error. It treats "Ukraine" as a single, undifferentiated risk, when the entire opportunity lives in the spaces between the risks that the headline collapses into one word.
I have spent enough years watching capital behave at extremes to know that the most durable mispricings appear precisely where a population of investors stops distinguishing. When a market becomes a synonym for danger, the price stops reflecting the asset and starts reflecting the emotion. That gap — between the asset and the emotion attached to it — is where I work.
So my answer to the first question is a reframing. I do not invest in "the war." I invest in a specific building, in a specific district, with a specific title, generating a specific rent, at a price that already assumes the worst version of the future. The war is the reason the price is what it is. It is not the thing I am buying. That distinction is the whole of my Ukraine real estate investment thesis, and everything else in this essay is an elaboration of it.
What I See That the Risk Models Miss
Institutional risk models are built to be defensible, not accurate. When a sovereign carries an active conflict, the models default to "uninvestable," and an entire continent of capital follows that single word out the door. What the models miss is that risk is not one variable. It is a bundle, and the components do not move together.
Physical risk in Pechersk — central Kyiv, well inside the air-defence umbrella — is not the same as physical risk in a front-line oblast. They differ by orders of magnitude, and conflating them is not conservatism; it is laziness dressed as prudence. Title risk is separable again: a clean registry entry on a 2018 building is a different instrument from a contested plot. Currency risk, liquidity risk, and exit risk are each their own line, each measurable, each already discounted into an entry price that simply will not survive a ceasefire.
The numbers are not abstract. Prime Kyiv residential reached roughly $4,596 per square metre in 2025, up around 4 percent on the year — a market that is functioning, transacting, and appreciating while the desks that cover it write it off. The Kyiv premium segment in Pechersk is forecast to add 8 to 10 percent in 2026. Prime yields in the capital sit in the 8 to 11 percent range. Compare that to Warsaw at 5.2 percent — a peaceful, EU-member capital two countries west — and you are looking at three to five points of additional yield as compensation for risks that, parsed properly, are far narrower than the word "war" implies.
What the models miss, in one sentence, is this: they price the headline, and I price the cash flow.
The Discipline of Buying When Others Run
Buying when others run is easy to say and structurally difficult to do, because the same conditions that create the opportunity also strip away every comfort that normally accompanies a purchase. There are no syndicate partners reassuring you. There is no consensus to hide behind. There is no quarterly report where "we are positioned in Ukraine" reads as anything but reckless to a reviewer who has not done the work.
The discipline of wartime property investing is therefore as much psychological as it is analytical. It requires holding a thesis in the absence of social confirmation, which is the rarest skill in capital markets and the one that pays the most. I size positions so that I am never forced to sell at the bottom of a news cycle. I buy with no leverage, because in a market where credit is scarce and expensive, the all-cash buyer is the marginal price-setter — and the no-leverage premium is real, both in the discount I command on entry and in my freedom to wait indefinitely on exit.
I also accept being early and being lonely as the cost of the trade, not a flaw in it. If the position were comfortable, it would already be priced like Warsaw. The discomfort is the yield. Discipline, here, is simply the refusal to let other people's fear set my entry — and the patience to let their eventual return set my exit.
How Patient Capital Reads a War
Patient capital reads a war differently than trading capital does. Trading capital asks what happens this week. Patient capital asks what the asset is worth on the other side of a resolution that is not a question of if, but when. Wars end. Every one of them has. And when they end, the capital that fled returns faster than anyone predicts, because the same herd behaviour that drives money out drives it back in.
The historical record on this is not ambiguous. Post-conflict capital cities re-rate prime residential toward — and frequently past — their pre-conflict peaks within five to eight years. Sarajevo prime property rose roughly 220 percent in the decade after the siege lifted. Tbilisi appreciated around 180 percent in the years following its conflict and subsequent stabilisation. These are not exotic outliers; they are the base rate for what happens when a functioning city stops being a war zone and starts being a normal place to live again.
Layer onto that the reconstruction arithmetic. The World Bank estimates Ukraine's rebuilding need at roughly $486 billion. Capital at that scale does not arrive and leave; it settles, it employs, it creates demand for housing among the people who administer it and the people who execute it. Diaspora capital — millions of Ukrainians abroad with both the means and the motive to invest at home — is a coiled spring waiting on a single signal. Patient capital reads a war as a clock running down on a discount that closes the moment the signal arrives. The only mistake is to wait for the signal before you buy, because by then the price has already moved.
What I'm Actually Underwriting
I want to be precise about what I am and am not betting on, because vague conviction is how investors lose money in markets like this. I am not underwriting an outcome on the battlefield. I have no edge there, and any investor who claims one is fooling themselves or you.
What I am underwriting is a structure: bounded downside, open upside, and positive carry while I wait. The downside is bounded because I buy at prices that already assume prolonged conflict, in districts where the physical risk is genuinely low, with no debt that could force a sale. The upside is open because a ceasefire — not a victory, simply a cessation — re-rates the entire asset class toward European comparables. And the carry is positive because the property rents today, at 8 to 11 percent gross, paying me to hold the option.
That is the anatomy of an asymmetric position, and asymmetry is the only thing in investing that genuinely compounds in your favour. I underwrite a clean title, a central location, a real tenant, a real yield, and a re-rating that history says is closer to certain than to speculative. Everything I do not control — the timing of peace, the pace of reconstruction, the path of the currency — I have priced as a cost rather than a hope. This is the same separable-risk discipline I bring to all of my capital allocation across emerging markets: isolate what you can measure, refuse to pay for what you cannot, and let the carry fund your patience.
The Position I'm Comfortable Holding
The reason I am comfortable holding this position is not optimism. Optimism is not a strategy, and I do not own anything because I hope it works. I own it because the structure protects me if I am wrong about timing and rewards me if I am right about direction — and because the price I paid already conceded the bad outcome before I ever signed.
The Kyiv real estate opportunity 2026 is, at its core, a question about who is willing to do the work of disaggregating a risk that everyone else rounds up to a single word. I am comfortable because I have done that work: I know the district, the title, the tenant, the yield, and the precedent. I am comfortable because I am paid to wait, and because waiting is the one thing the all-cash, no-leverage buyer can do without limit.
When people ask me why Ruslan Averin invests in Ukrainian real estate during the war, the real answer is the boring one. It is not courage and it is not contrarianism for its own sake. It is patient capital Ukraine in its purest expression — buying a functioning, cash-generating asset at a price set by fear, underwriting a recovery the historical record makes nearly inevitable, and holding the position long enough for the rest of the market to arrive at the conclusion I reached first. The crowd will get here. I would simply rather already own the building when it does.
By Ruslan Averin.