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On the first day of the war, air raids began. We prepared ourselves for the night in a bomb shelter. Toward evening, we received a phone call from familiar diplomats who strongly advised us to leave Kyiv. It took 30 minutes to make a decision. We decided to go to the Western part of Ukraine because there it would be easier to use our international connections to help our colleagues and friends in resolving the logistical issues of a possible evacuation. Together with foreign journalists, we left the city in two cars at 21.00. It took us more than a day to cover a distance of 600 km, which usually takes 6 hours. For the first time in my life, I was driving with no sleep for such a long time. In the car with us, there were three guys who wanted to leave the country, our cat, as well as the cat and dog of one of the guys.

In the following days, all of our team members left Kyiv. The adviser of our bureau, Zinaida Reznytska, stayed in Kyiv for the longest period. She, her two-month-old baby, and her husband spent more than a week in the bomb shelter. Now our entire team is safe. We are trying to restore the workflow on a remote basis.

In the village where we live with our friends now, the state border service established a checkpoint on the first day of the war. Every five hours, a shift of two border guards and two volunteers takes up duty. One day my shift started at 6:30 in the morning. I had just put my clothes on when I received a message on the phone about the alarm in our Kyiv office. I realized that a missile had hit the building or something near it. In a few days, I asked my relative to check the office. He sent us photos showing broken windows in the office due to the air attack.

On the street where we live in Kyiv, there have already been two hits by Russian missiles. One of them hit the hospital. Thank God, no one was hurt. And fragments of the other, after it was destroyed by the Ukrainian air defense, smashed the upper floors of a residential building. The building, in which the hospital is situated now, was a military design bureau 30 years ago. Russians are using paper maps of the 80s for their attacks.

As for our work, the Ukrainian professional IP community has cut off cooperation with all Russian colleagues and applicants. Most of my Russian partners ignored the issue of war. They cowardly pretended that nothing had happened and continued to send us new applications, requests, and instructions. There were also those who publicly supported us (this is a very brave act because in Russia there is a criminal punishment for disagreeing with Putin's policy)., we will be ready to continue working with them in the realities of the new Russia, although I am afraid that this time will not come very soon.

The Russian IP system is in agony. The Russian government is threatening to terminate registrations owned by residents of "unfriendly countries". There are already court decisions that reject the claims of Western IP rights holders only because they are residents of “unfriendly countries” (for example, the Peppa Pig case). There are local applications to register trademarks similar to world-famous brands.

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