McDonald's Ukraine announced the return of its breakfast menu in six Ukrainian cities after the menu’s disappearance following the start of Russia’s full-scale Russian in February 2022, the company said in a press release on March 13.
The comeback of McDonald's breakfast in Ukraine follows months of customer requests, with social media users repeatedly calling for its comeback and turning it into a viral trend.
The announcement comes as more Western companies expand offerings to Ukrainian customers amid the full-scale war, with some companies choosing to reopen storefronts across the country.
"Around 60% of goods and products for McDonald's in Ukraine come from local suppliers. The company provides stable and large-scale orders, helping create new jobs and increasing tax revenues," said Oleksandr Bohorodov, CFO of McDonald's Ukraine.
Breakfast is now available in six western Ukrainian cities – Lviv, Lutsk, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, Yaremche, and Kovel – until 10:30 AM in restaurants and 10:15 AM for delivery. Before relaunching its breakfast menu, McDonald's has been testing it in Vinnytsia since December.
After Russia's full-scale invasion, McDonald's temporarily suspended operations and reopened its first three restaurants in Kyiv in September 2022.
McDonald's said breakfast will return to more cities in the coming weeks. However, in eastern regions closer to the front line, including Poltava, Dnipro, Kremenchuk, Kryvyi Rih, Kropyvnytskyi, and Oleksandriia, the breakfast menu will remain unavailable.
The obstacles are primarily air raids and related operational difficulties, McDonald's wrote.
For safety reasons, McDonald's restaurants close during air raid alerts, and all employees must take shelter. Once the alert ends, it takes about an hour to restart equipment and prepare for reopening, the company said.
According to air raid statistics, on March 12, Sumy Oblast was under alert for 20 hours, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast for 17.5 hours, and Kharkiv Oblast for over 14 hours per day.
Currently, 109 McDonald's restaurants are operating in 36 cities across Ukraine, the same number as before the invasion, employing around 10,000 people. Fifteen McDonald's locations in Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv, and Sumy remain closed, while restaurants in Dnipro, the main city of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, reopened in 2023.
In January 2025, a Russian missile strike on Kyiv damaged Ukraine’s oldest McDonald's, which first opened in 1997 as the country's first-ever location.
Other retailers like H&M reopened in November 2023, while Inditex, a Spanish-owned multinational company that owns Zara and other brands, reopened some of their stores in Kyiv in 2024. Swedish furniture giant Ikea also reopened their stores in Ukraine last summer.
In 2022, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, McDonald's closed its 847 restaurants in Russia, taking a financial hit of $55 million per month before fully exiting the Russian market.
Dinara Khalilova
