Rising prices, drop in bookings, and organizing aid: Russian businesses affected by the war

Russian businesses in Catalonia have been experiencing some side effects to the invasion of Ukraine, from a drop in income to a rise in prices for some of their goods. 

Last week, Catalonia Trade & Investment (ACCIÓ), Catalonia’s business competitiveness agency, warned that companies based here could experience some disruption in prices and imports of sunflower oil and corn.

Some 44% of the sunflower oil that Catalonia imports comes from Ukraine, while around 35% of all the corn that arrives into the territory does as well. 

Ashot, who runs a Russian supermarket in Lloret de Mar has noticed this price hike already. He explained to Catalan News that the sunflower oil import price for him has already doubled, from around €1.50 a litre to now €3. 

He said that his shop has around 1,000 products that come originally from Russia and Ukraine and that he has seen an increase in prices across the board of around 10% on average so far, although some products have increased in price by up to 25%. 

Flour is another product that has increased in price significantly, which is another major export of Ukraine and Russia, which many businesses have felt the brunt of. Marina, originally from Odessa, works in the Russian bakery ‘Bakers Panadería’ in Barcelona, where they have also noticed increases in the prices of flour and sunflower oil. 

Ekaterina is a Russian restaurant in the center of Barcelona, run and owned by Genya Petrova. She explains to Catalan News that she uses a lot of authentic Russian ingredients that cannot be found locally and estimates that import prices have gone up by 20-30%. “I was doing this week’s orders and the jump in prices surprised me a lot,” she said.

Restaurant bookings down

Oxana, from the restaurant Souvenir in Barcelona, told Catalan News that shortly after the invasion began, she noticed bookings dropped by 30%. However, she is relatively confident that the soft boycotting of her Russian restaurant won’t last too long, and she hasn’t felt the brunt of rising prices because she uses locally sourced ingredients as much as possible. 

Genya from Ekaterina explained that on the first couple of days after the war broke out, she had almost no new customers come to the restaurant, just some of her regulars. 

She experienced some Russophobia as a backlash to the war, as some people placed stickers outside her restaurant, left bad reviews online, and sent her insulting comments online. 

She took to social media to explain her position, that she is “against the war, that even though [she’s] Russian, that doesn’t mean [she’s] on Putin’s side,” and she placed signs on the front of the restaurant denouncing the president of her home country and in support of Ukraine. 

“I think that’s made people understand,” she says. After a short period of customers ignoring her restaurant, and after she marked her position on the geopolitical crisis both on her own social media profiles as well as speaking to various local media outlets in Barcelona, that’s when new customers began returning, recognising that she was unfairly suffering as a result of Putin’s invasion. 

The fact that Genya has spoken out against the war has left her in a difficult situation – she believes she will never be able to go back to her home country, as she could be detained immediately upon arrival after speaking out against the war so prominently. 

This causes her much heartache as she still has plenty of family members back home in Russia. At the moment, she doesn’t know how she will ever get to see them again, as it is also very complicated for Russians to leave their home country at the moment. She laments the fact that she has nieces and nephews that she has never met and that she might not be able to bring her own son to visit Russia and let him see that part of his heritage. 

Solidarity efforts

Marina from the Bakers Panadería explained to Catalan News that the bakery has various employees from Ukraine, Russia, and the Russian-speaking world, and they have all been very emotionally affected by the war. 

They’ve been collecting aid supplies as well as financial donations to send to Ukraine to help out in any manner they can. 

Genya from the restaurant Ekaterina is also doing her part to send solidarity to Ukraine. She’s put ‘borsch’ on her menu – a type of beetroot and beef soup that is a national dish of Ukraine. In the restaurant, it costs €7.50, but €5 per dish is sent to NGOs working in the war-torn nation.