At the price of silver. Who in Ukraine is restoring the production of black caviar?

In the first weeks of the war, in early March 2022, four boxes of black caviar disappeared from the customs terminal at Boryspil Airport. This was an export shipment to the USA from the Odessa fish farming company "Aquatop".

The goods passed customs on February 23 and were ready for loading onto the plane. "When a couple of weeks passed after February 24, when I asked about the caviar at the airport, they replied that it had disappeared," says Oleksandr Lushkin, director and one of the founders of Aquatop, with a shrug.

In a week, he will start distributing sturgeon to military hospitals and preparing the largest intensive sturgeon farming complex for preservation. "Now all the 5,000 cubic meter tanks, which held up to 100 tons of sturgeon, are empty. During shelling, it's impossible to maintain the operation of such a large complex," says Oleksandr Lushkin. The largest exporter of Ukrainian caviar, with production capacity reaching 4,000 kilograms per year, stopped operations in the spring of 2022.

However, the production of black caviar in Ukraine is not only being maintained but is even growing. According to the State Agency of Fisheries, almost 2,500 kilograms of black caviar were produced in 2024. 14 companies are involved in this, slightly more than in 2023, when 12 enterprises reported participation in the sturgeon business. And these are only official figures.

The actual volumes are larger, according to the professional association "Ukrainian Aquaculture Community" (UAC). Who is getting into the black caviar farming business and why?