From among the heads of more than 200 private companies, the organisers selected 16 CEOs who have demonstrated the strongest leadership of their teams amid war and uncertainty.
The ranking assesses executives not by the size of their businesses, but by the quality of their leadership and their ability to manage their companies effectively. It focuses on people-centred leadership: how executives build teams, make decisions and sustain their organisations during wartime.
Each executive’s final score was based on four components: business performance, employees’ perceptions of their leader and company, the CEO’s personal qualities and civic stance, and the jury’s assessment. The anonymous employee survey carried the greatest weight, accounting for more than half of the overall score.
The organisers also took into account the particular challenges facing Ukrainian businesses and applied a wartime resilience factor: losses caused by Russian aggression were not counted against executives. NV’s experts consider the ability to preserve a company, jobs and production under missile attack to be a mark of strong leadership.
The top five in the ranking comprised the CEOs of First Ukrainian International Bank, Kernel, Winner Group Ukraine, METRO Ukraine and Aurora Multimarket. Category winners were selected across 10 sectors of the economy.
NV reported that Yuriy Ryzhenkov, a 50-year-old native of Donetsk, has spent more than 20 years in senior leadership roles. He served as deputy chief financial officer and chief financial officer at ISTIL Group, has held other CFO and COO positions, and was a member of the executive team at energy major DTEK. He joined Metinvest as CEO in December 2013.
Under his leadership, the Group has become one of the largest private-sector donors to the armed forces of Ukraine during the full-scale war. Since 2022, it has allocated UAH10.1 billion to support Ukraine and its people, including UAH7.3 billion for the army through Rinat Akhmetov’s Steel Front defence initiative. Its enterprises have also launched the production of goods for the front line, including protective equipment for military personnel and vehicles.
Above all, Metinvest remains one of Ukraine’s largest domestic investors and taxpayers. Between 2022 and 2025, the Group invested UAH43.6 billion in developing its enterprises and paid more than UAH82.2 billion in taxes.