KIEV, Ukraine -- During the 15 years that Nicholas Labenskyj has lived in Ukraine, he has done everything from construction to running a marriage agency. Now the 60-year-old New York native jokes that he is “too old for prostitution” and devotes most of his time to promoting Ukraine’s many other attractions.

Ukraine Plus Group, a company founded by Labenskyj, is currently developing a network of Web portals that will eventually carry tourist information about each of Ukraine’s regional centers.

“I do this because nobody else does,” said Labenskyj, who started his Web business two years ago with the launch of an English-language Internet site about Ukraine’s capital called kievukraine.info.

Spurred by heightened interest in Ukraine from his Western friends following the Orange Revolution, the Kyiv-based Ukrainian-American then set up his own news blog in January 2005. As the popularity of his blog grew, Labenskyj decided to turn it into a more ambitious project consisting of 22 information portals available in English and Russian and covering the country’s major cities, including one on Kyiv, which would carry information ranging from accommodation options to business opportunities.

“It seems that everything in the country that is beyond Kyiv still remains a mystery for a foreigner, and there are so many things to do in Ukraine that hardly anyone knows about,” Labenskyj said.

“It’s not only skiing in the Carpathians or swimming in beautiful Crimea that foreigners don’t know about,” according to Labenskyj, who hopes his websites will shed light on other exciting things one can do in Ukraine.

“You can ride a tank, you can shoot a rocket, and you can even get behind the controls of a fighter plane in Ukraine,” Labenskyj confided mischievously, noting that the latter activity is available for those willing to spend $1,000 for a half-hour flight.

But while information for extreme addicts is still in the works, everything else that is potentially interesting for foreigners coming to Ukraine is already on Ukraine Plus Group’s first three fully operational websites, which are dedicated to Kyiv, Lviv and Odessa.

Each of the sites features one news story linked to Labenskyj’s news blog on Ukraine, a daily editor’s pick that deals with Ukrainian culture and offers basic city guide information. Labenskyj said that his blog serves as a news service for his sites and contains stories from international news agencies and European newspapers, which he doesn’t get permission to use. “So far, nobody complained,” he said, adding that he tries to pick only positive stories.

“It may not be correct journalism, but I want to present Ukraine’s better face,” he said.

Profitable business

A desire to present Ukraine’s best sides ties in with the business opportunities linked to Labenskyj’s Web project, which he created to attract more tourists and foreign investors to Ukraine.

The curt New Yorker said an opportunity to make money on advertising is not the only attractive business side to his project.

“As part of our Web site, we also rent apartments, offer flat renovation, consulting and translation services, and we pick up and drop off our clients from the airport,” said Labenskyj, who admits it’s much easier to develop such a business in Ukraine than in the Unites States, where each of the services would have to be registered under separate business entities.

And despite the monetary prospects, it’s also just fun to do, Labenskyj said.

“We do want to make money on these sites, but we also want to expand tourism in Ukraine,” said Labenskyj, who claims his Kyiv site – www.kyivplus.com – gets over 100,000 unique visitors every month. The Russian version of the site boasts only a fraction of this figure, he noted, as the English-language site is advertised on many other websites, including Google and MSN.

Kyivplus is not rated by any of the Ukrainian Web portals, but is listed on META web portal, Labenskyj said.

“If you want to go to most major cities in Europe and get on the Internet, you’ll see that the informational websites about them are professionally done, and that’s what we want to do here,” he said.

Similar websites on major European cities, however, don’t have photos of attractive women on their front pages, as Labenskyj’s do.

The Diaspora businessman, nevertheless, denied that he is in the marriage agency business.

“I gave this up a while ago, as I discovered that too many men were coming to Ukraine, especially Americans who are not serious about getting married.” Still, Labenskyj said he receives about five calls a week with inquiries about dating services in Ukraine.

“I refer them to my partner – a Ukrainian woman who manages a dating agency,” Labenskyj explained.

Other expatriates who run similar informational sites on Ukraine and Kyiv say they position their projects differently and are not afraid of competition.

For example, German Beate Schober and Czech Anna Ramboushkova run a site called www.go2kiev.com.ua.

Schober said one of the biggest differences between their site and Labenskyj’s project is that their site does not have a trace of dating services.

by Yulianna Vilkos, Kyiv Post Staff Writer
Apr 13 2006, 01:13