«Ranok» after the strike: three to five years for recovery, reprinting 620,000 textbooks, and an anti-crisis plan

The Russian strike on the warehouse complex of the «Ranok» publishing corporation in Kharkiv has become one of the most destructive events for the Ukrainian book industry throughout the war. Preliminary estimates indicate that the attack destroyed millions of already printed and delivery-ready books and textbooks. The fire covered an area exceeding 9,000 square meters, and the total damage, according to company management, amounted to approximately 1 billion UAH. Viktor Kruhlov, the General Director of the publishing house, told RBK-Ukraine that fully restoring «Ranok» will take at least three to five years—a timeframe that reflects the scale of losses not only in terms of burnt print runs but also in terms of destroyed storage and logistics infrastructure.

Anti-crisis headquarters and first steps

The team's reaction to the strike was lightning-fast: the publishing house's anti-crisis headquarters was assembled the day after the attack, while rescuers continued to fight the fire, which was fully extinguished only on the seventh day. Kruhlov emphasized that the team's work did not stop for a single day. It was critically important that the book files and layouts were preserved thanks to cloud backup—this prevented the loss of intellectual property and allowed for a quick start to reprinting. Based on this data, the company has already formed a preliminary recovery plan and begun assessing the damage.

Cost-cutting, loans, and logistics restructuring

One of the key directions of the anti-crisis plan was strict cost optimization. According to Kruhlov, the team agreed to temporary salary limitations, and letters requesting discounts were sent to warehouse landlords—«almost everyone supported us». The publishing house formed a reduced budget, which then had to be reviewed again to balance expenses. In parallel, «Ranok» is negotiating loans with banks, but at the time of publication, a positive result had not yet been received. A separate task was the restructuring of logistics: due to the ongoing risk of strikes, the company plans to diversify delivery routes and book storage locations to avoid dependence on a single large warehouse.

Reprinting 620,000 textbooks

The priority in restoring print runs was Category A—the most in-demand educational publications without which normal school operations are impossible. Seven printing houses have already agreed to urgently reprint 620,000 textbooks, while other categories of publications will be considered separately. To prevent disruption of the educational process, «Ranok» continues to deliver textbooks to schools from reserve warehouses. Thus, the company is trying to simultaneously mitigate the consequences of the strike and ensure the continuity of supplies for the education system.

Contradictory data

There are discrepancies between sources regarding the assessment of damage and chronology. In materials from RBK-Ukraine and 24tv, the damage to «Ranok» is estimated at approximately 1 billion UAH, whereas in a Focus.ua publication dedicated to the strike on the warehouses of «Ranok» and Rozum, the figure of 30 million UAH in «losses of one of them» is mentioned. The ambiguity of the wording does not allow for a definitive determination of which specific publishing house this sum refers to, and it is possible that it reflects an assessment of one of the objects or one of the affected players. Furthermore, the exact date of the strike on the Kharkiv complex is presented differently in various materials: Focus.ua dates the shelling to August 1, while the main text emphasizes the duration of the firefighting (seven days) without tying it to a specific calendar date. These discrepancies require additional verification when publishing exact financial figures.

Context: a series of strikes on the book industry

The strike on «Ranok» is not an isolated incident. On the night of July 19, the warehouse of the «Knyholav» publishing house, which stored about 250,000 books, was destroyed by shelling, and on July 2, during an attack on Kyiv, the warehouse of the logistics partner of the BookChef publishing house was destroyed, resulting in the burning of approximately 800,000 books. The combination of these events shows the systemic vulnerability of Ukrainian book publishing and logistics in wartime conditions and explains why «Ranok» is betting specifically on the diversification of storage and routes—to ensure that the next strike does not paralyze the entire industry.