Entrepreneur Kateryna Osipova was nearly finished renovating her new business, a drugstore, when Ukraine went into COVID-19 lockdown on March 18, 2020. This would be the first drugstore in Kateryna’s neighborhood of Mala Korenykha, on the outskirts of the southern city of Mykolaiv. “Just when I was ready to apply for my license, trains stopped running and offices of public institutions closed,” she says.

The abrupt shutdown came as a shock to Kateryna. But it also presented an opportunity: to become the first applicant to receive an online license for the sale of pharmaceuticals.