Ukraine: a chocolatier at war

Before long the brothers began to experiment with flavours, making low-sugar chocolate sweetened with freeze-dried local berries. “We wanted something to differentiate us from everyone else,” Oleksiy told me when we first met in September last year. “In my old job, I used to travel a lot on business trips. I liked to bring some sweets to my colleagues, but I could never find anything interesting to take abroad.” Their innovation soon paid off: they became the first Ukrainians to win a prestigious Academy of Chocolate award, for a bar made with rose petals and dried grapes, a combination inspired by a verse about happiness by the Kyiv poet Maksym Rylsky. They found local artists to design their packaging with traditional Ukrainian themes, and collaborated with the graphic illustrator Sergiy Maidukov, widely acclaimed for his bold, modernist designs.

Business was going well for Meetty – but then came the full-scale Russian invasion, in February 2022, when living and working in Ukraine suddenly became a matter of survival. The brothers worried if anyone would have money to spend on handmade chocolate, but they need not have: small affordable luxuries soon became sacred fragments of normal life to people, things they clung to when everything else became stressful and hard.

I first went to meet the brothers in their small production facility in Kremenchuk, an innocuous-looking building perched on a verge next to some blocks of flats. Minutes after I arrived, the building was plunged into darkness. All the lights suddenly went off, along with the brothers’ conching machines, which slowly churn and pulverise cacao nibs into smooth, liquid chocolate. Conching is a two-day process and chocolate is a capricious beast: if the machinery were to shut down for too long, the chocolate would seize up and spoil. During the invasion, keeping the machines running 24 hours a day has become a constant challenge. “We had to buy a big generator that would switch on automatically,” Oleksiy said. “If the power went down after midnight, during the city’s curfew, Dmytro couldn’t come out and turn it on himself. But he managed to devise a special gadget so he could turn it on remotely.” The brothers couldn’t afford to keep the factory running on expensive generator power, so during my visit the only light came from a phone torch. In the fierce heat of summer, when they had no refrigeration, they simply shipped their bars to customers as soon as they were made, to avoid everything melting as it sat on their shelves.

I watched them work for a while. Dmytro began tempering a pool of chocolate on a marble slab, pushing it to and fro with a metal scraper to cool it down, before deftly portioning it into moulds. “Now, of course, we must try some,” Oleksiy said, tearing open a selection of bars, under the dim blue-grey glow of the phone torch. An experimental chocolate made with donkey milk tasted strongly of the farmyard and was perhaps too experimental, but I went back for more of the award-winning rose and grape bar, and another made with cashew and cranberries. They proudly showed me framed certificates from the Academy of Chocolate on the back wall. We drank tea made from leftover cacao husk.

Like most Ukrainian firms, Meetty donated to the war effort. They made a special chocolate bar to give to soldiers, and another for people who had given blood. And Oleksiy was already filling his limited spare time with a side-hustle doing corporate law work for a steel and mining group, as well as helping a charity in the Chernihiv region to build bomb shelters and repair homes damaged by shelling.

But he wanted to do more. Halfway through 2024, a contact invited him to join a volunteer unit called Mriya, part of Ukraine’s Territorial Defence, the country’s military reserve force. Unlike the full-time army, it would allow him to maintain the brothers’ chocolate business, while performing military service at the same time.

When I next met Oleksiy, in February, he was in uniform. He had been up since 4am at a training ground somewhere near Kyiv, to which he drives 300km from Kremenchuk every week, and where he learned everything from emergency medicine to military tactics. We arranged to meet his commander, so I could get permission to spend a day with his Mriya team.

Serhii Sas, a former Ukrainian MP and Constitutional Court judge, had established the unit at the beginning of the full-scale war. He recruited fellow judges, lawyers and students, including women. Mostly they were Kyiv residents who were not eligible for the regular draft but who still wanted the chance to defend their city. They began assisting with air defence after the Russians first targeted cities across Ukraine with Iranian-made Shahed drones in the autumn of 2022.

The commander’s office was full of maps, charts and chunks of shot-down drones. “Look at this piece,” he said, pointing at shards of metal displayed on a bookshelf. “A component made in Germany!” Dotted around were pieces of Winston Churchill memorabilia – Sas had been strongly motivated by the actions of Londoners during the Second World War, he said. “These ordinary citizens rushed to defend their city from the Nazis. And now we have our own Nazis to fight: the Russians.”

Early the next morning, Oleksiy picked me up to drive to a position. He had brought his dog with him, a small white terrier called Jasmine. “I would sign up for a 24-hour shift,” he said, “but I have to look after her.” We reached a high-rise building and took the lift to the top floor, then walked up the fire-escape stairs to the roof. There was a small cabin, which the men had turned into a temporary home and the terrier immediately curled up on a blanket on the only comfortable chair in the room. There was a tablet screen with a map of the Kyiv region, and small drone-shaped flashing lights flickering on and off. “Red is the Russians, green is ours,” Oleksiy said. Next to the tablet was a two-way radio and a mobile phone that would occasionally crackle into life with some urgent orders.

If drones started crossing the regional boundary, Oleksiy said they would instantly get an alert on the phone, before the public air raid alarm went off. “Also, we can see on this tablet the nearest Shaheds, and their direction, and we can work out how long it will take them to reach Kyiv. We have three stages of alert, which gives us a few minutes to get ready.”

On the back wall, next to a large Ukrainian flag imprinted with the Mriya emblem, there were neat piles of body armour and helmets, and long magazines of machine-gun bullets, some tipped in tracer red. “We always make sure everything is in order, how many bullets we have, we familiarise ourselves each time with all the safety procedures.”

I went outside to see them loading up a 1940s Maxim machine gun, fixed to a turret they built themselves. There was a table covered in camouflage, with an AK-74 rifle and a searchlight made by a local firm. “The weapons we get from the army,” Oleksiy said. “The rest we pay for ourselves. The uniforms, the tablets, anything else we need.”

Protecting the skies over Kyiv is a vastly complex operation and the Mriya volunteers are trained to operate the various firearms, night-vision devices and thermal-imagers so that they can maintain their positions around the clock. “The fire sector is quite narrow,” Oleksiy explained. “If some drone is coming in this direction and we see a target, then it is our responsibility.” It’s up to whoever is in command to give the orders. They can’t shoot just anywhere, as there are residential buildings nearby. “Sometimes it might be flying very close, but it’s not quite in the right sector, so you can’t do anything.” Some of his colleagues had already seen plenty of active service in the fierce battles to drive Russian soldiers from Kyiv. And after such a dark and desperate fight, here they were again, this time defending the city’s skies. They pointed at another rooftop some distance away and told me that it was the position where the judges work. Even Serhii Sas takes turns to be on duty.

There was a kettle with jars of tea and coffee to keep them awake and alert during the long shifts. One man had brought in a packet of chocolate biscuits, not Oleksiy’s organic chocolate, but some marshmallow-filled concoctions from the popular Roshen chain. At some point during the afternoon someone dropped off lunch, polystyrene boxes containing chicken and potatoes.

The day was bright and clear, and so the skies were quiet. One of the men began watching videos on his phone, while Oleksiy filled out some forms and got a little paperwork done. “You will have noticed,” he said, “that everything starts at night.” It was just beginning to get dark when the next shift arrived. A couple of hours after we left, when I was back in the apartment, the air alarm cut through the darkness, warning of an incoming attack. The skies above the city were loud: first the nasty buzzing sound of the drones, then the rapid fire of the air defence working and the distant boom of explosions.

The Russians had begun to change their tactics, sending large numbers of drones to the same target, flying high to avoid the machine-gun fire, then diving all at the same time. I thought of the men on their rooftops, ready at their positions, training their searchlights into the sky, waiting to fire and then, after such a night, changing out of their combat gear and going straight back to work.

Belonging to a volunteer unit like Mriya doesn’t stop eligible men, including bakers and cooks, from being drafted: more than 300 of their members have gone on to join the regular army, either voluntarily or through call-up. Several Ukrainian men I’ve spoken to recently have since become part of the military. Like Yuri, a committed vegan who practised yoga and made wood-fired sourdough at the Khatynka Pekarya in Bucha. He joined an assault brigade shortly after we met and was deployed to the frontlines in the east of the country. Yaroslav, the bakery owner, soon joined up, too, transferring the business he had built with his own hands to his mother. In Kyiv, a young female pastry chef who worked at a small confectionery firm called Nomer Domu volunteered as a combat medic in the Azov Brigade. The firm now makes jars of apricot chutney using her recipe. Another baker friend was suddenly mobilised by the military commission, leaving his colleague in sole charge of their bread business, as well as the café they had only just opened together.

As for Oleksiy, he knows he could be drafted at any time: his service in Mriya would make it even more likely, not less. But for now, he continues to make the long drive between Kyiv and his chocolate factory in Kremenchuk every week, where he and Dmytro are devising a new range of bars for an upmarket supermarket chain and taking a course in business development funded by a scholarship for entrepreneurs. “Meetty is always with me in the background,” Oleksiy told me, “even when I’m elsewhere.”

This is what Ukrainians have come to call their war-life balance: one eye on the everyday, the other on the war effort. When I asked how it felt to live this kind of double life he told me it somehow doesn’t feel like that. “Of course, it’s a lot to carry,” he said, “but knowing I’m helping to protect the conditions for people in Kyiv to live, to keep some kind of normal life going…” They have lived through so much already: the Chernobyl disaster, the collapse of the USSR, independence, revolutions, the pandemic, now Russia’s full-scale war. “Life has prepared us, step by step, for what once seemed unimaginable,” Oleksiy said. After three long years all this has come to feel like normality. And yet still, amid the relentless uncertainty of ceasefire proposals and new offensives and peace talks hosted by foreign leaders in foreign lands, there remains a strong belief that this long and violent war will finally come to an end – and chocolate-making will continue in earnest.

Felicity Spector is a senior producer at Channel 4 News and the author of Bread and War: A Ukrainian Story of Food, Bravery and Hope, published by Duckworth at £20

Photographs by Sasha Maslov