‘Legendary’ Ukrainian resourcefulness inspires Canadian vodka CEO into action

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Canadian entrepreneur Katherine Vellinga was bumping through the streets of a Ukrainian city in a relative’s Lada when the vehicle sputtered to a stop.

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Her relative didn’t panic. He didn’t call for a tow. Instead, he calmly stepped from the vehicle with what appeared to be a piece of fabric, popped the hood, fiddled with a thingamajig, hopped back in the driver’s seat, restarted the engine and continued onward.

“The resourcefulness of the Ukrainian people is legendary,” Vellinga said.

Her point, in referencing the roadside repair back in 1997, is that the images emerging from Ukraine today in news clips, social-media posts and written accounts aren’t outliers, but evidence of what Ukrainians have always been made of. There’s the man with a cigarette in his mouth matter-of-factly removing a landmine from the road; townsfolk scolding Russian tanks; ordinary people shouldering arms; IT workers forming a hacker army; and a president telling the world that he is not going anywhere, and neither is Ukrainian democracy.

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“This isn’t new,” Vellinga said. “During the Soviet Union times, everybody had to figure out how to get around things, how to cooperate, how to create. It’s something I saw from the first day I landed there.”

That is, from the moment she climbed into a piece-of-fabric-powered Lada a quarter-century ago and founded Emergex Business Solutions Ltd., a Kyiv-based consultancy with her husband, John, and a couple of other partners.

It was a work-life decision that immersed the then late-20-something-year-old in the country’s dinner-table culture and the beverage at the heart of it: Ukrainian vodka.

Today, the former consultant is the founder and chief executive of Zirkova Vodka, a made-in-Ukraine, sold-in-Ontario brand of vodka described in tasting notes as possessing “almond, vanilla, hay and citrus flavours.”

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It sounds delicious, but it is completely irrelevant, said Vellinga, who in the past week has undergone a transformation from her business meaning everything to her, to it being the least of her concerns, perhaps even trivial in the face of global events. The executive is now fielding 500 messages a day from her contacts in a war zone and “premium vodka” certainly isn’t the subject line.

“Nobody is thinking about their business right now,” she said from her home in Oakville, Ont.

The 52-year-old’s Ukrainian roots run much deeper than just dollars and cents. Her parents are Ukrainian-Canadians, and while she was born in Canada, she didn’t speak English until she was five.

Nobody is thinking about their business right now

Katherine Vellinga

At age eight, her grandfather gave her a book filled with survivor accounts of the Joseph Stalin-engineered famine and genocide that claimed millions of Ukrainian lives in the early 1930s. For fun, the family marched in demonstrations outside the Soviet consulate in Toronto, calling for Ukrainian independence.

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“My childhood was Canadian by day, Ukrainian by weekend,” Vellinga said.

In other words, she wasn’t raised oblivious to the reality of Russian aggression.

One of the buzzwords of business is “future proofing,” or taking steps to prepare an enterprise for the worst-case scenario, so Vellinga took note when reports of irregular Russian troop movements started trickling out in December.

My childhood was Canadian by day, Ukrainian by weekend

Katherine Vellinga

The Ukrainian distillery she is partnered with is a few hours south of Kyiv in a factory Nicholas II of Russia commissioned more than 100 years ago. The master distillers she works with are women, a norm, she said, in the Ukrainian tradition. The ingredients used to make the vodka are sourced country-wide, including in the east, home to a years-long running conflict between Russian-supported separatists and Ukrainian troops.

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“We were considering every scenario,” Vellinga said. “Honestly, we thought this was a lot of sabre-rattling, a frozen conflict, an attempt to scare off foreign investment and weaken Ukraine.”

As December tipped into January, she started working with her Ukrainian partners to get more product out of the country, a process that bumped up against European Union import/export regulations and her Canadian vendors who ignored her pleas to frontload orders before it was too late.

In speaking with her relatives and employees on the ground, Vellinga became convinced of what was to come, and her idea wasn’t to rescue the business, but to stockpile advance orders, pay off suppliers, use up raw materials and keep the money flowing into Ukrainian hands, just in case the worst happened.

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Trucks were ordered to transport the vodka, but the trucks cancelled. More trucks were arranged, but the Russians invaded the day they were to arrive.

“What you need to understand is it doesn’t even matter,” Vellinga said. “It is nothing compared to what the Ukrainian people are going through.”

Last Thursday, she felt helpless, hopeless. A day later it came to her: it was time for action, and while she can’t arrange a shipment of weapons for Ukraine, she is donating 100 per cent of her profits to humanitarian aid in Ukraine. (Drinkers take note: there are 5,845 bottles of Zirkova Vodka in stock at Ontario liquor store outlets).

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As for the future of Vellinga’s business, there are more pressing things to discuss in the here and now. The people she has known as colleagues, business contacts and friends are putting sandbags around buildings, joining territorial defence units, buying Kevlar jackets in bulk, organizing a media centre and joining an IT army.

“The Ukrainians aren’t saying to me, ‘Can you help me get out?’” she said. “No, they are saying, ‘Help us.’”

It is that legendary Ukrainian resourcefulness come to fore as the bombs keep falling; it is fixing a Lada with a piece of fabric and believing that freedom is something worth fighting for.

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