Once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the region of Lviv in Western Ukraine is leveraging its geographic and cultural proximity to Europe to attract investment from the EU

Stretching along the south-eastern border of Poland, the Ukrainian region of Lviv has recently become the country’s hub for transport and logistics as trade has shifted away from Russia and towards the European Union.

Keen to capitalize on its new status, the region’s government is pulling out all the stops to smooth the way for investment. In the past four years, it has carried out works on 1,700km of highways to enable road freight, while the €70 million Beskyd tunnel, opened in 2018, has doubled the turnover of cargo being shipped between Ukraine and the EU. 

While goods such as automobile components and vehicles dominate the outputs of the highly-developed industrial region, its governor, Oleh Synyutka, sees opportunities for IT and business process outsourcing, with the regional state administration’s head of investments estimating that as many as 5,000 BPO jobs could be created each year.

For foreign investors, the opportunities are manifold. The regional government’s ‘factory of Europe’ strategy, through which it aims to position Lviv as a key sourcing destination for EU companies, has already created 25,000 new manufacturing jobs, and a series of investment facilitation packages are bringing in an ever-growing number of foreign firms.