Ukraine has 39 rows in the Big Mac Index. I went looking for them expecting a hole — Russia’s series just stops dead at January 2022, and I’d assumed Ukraine’s did something similar. It doesn’t. The series runs from May 2004 to July 2026, and across twenty-two years it has missed exactly two editions.
One of those is January 2006, a small off-cycle survey that skipped most of the world. The other is July 2022.
That single gap — one blank row, July 2022 — is the only place in the entire dataset where you can see that a war happened.
The row that isn’t there
The July 2022 edition covers 53 markets. The January 2022 edition covered 56. Three rows disappeared between them. Worth naming all three — Denmark, Russia, Ukraine.
Denmark came back in January 2023. Ukraine came back in January 2023. Russia never did.
Russia’s last reading deserves a sentence of its own, because it gets quoted a lot and it’s almost always quoted wrong. ₽135, $1.74, 65.4% below the dollar — surveyed in January 2022, a month before the invasion. The price had been ₽135 for five straight editions by then, unchanged since January 2020. So the number people reach for as “Russia’s wartime Big Mac” is a peacetime number with a war-shaped caption. I wrote up the exit itself in why Russia has no McDonald’s — this piece isn’t about who left where.
Ukraine’s blank is different, and it has a boring physical cause. McDonald’s closed all 109 of its Ukrainian restaurants in late February 2022. The company announced a phased reopening on 11 August (Al Jazeera), and the first three Kyiv locations opened for delivery only on 20 September (NPR).
The Economist’s July survey window fell in the middle of that — after the closures, before the reopening. There was no Big Mac to price, so there’s no row. Not a collection failure. An absence of the thing being measured.
I build this site, so I went and checked what it does with that blank. The answer is embarrassing. Ukraine’s country page carries no price history at all — just the current number, large and confident. The homepage chart does hold Ukraine’s series with a proper null parked at 2022, except Ukraine isn’t in any of the five country groups a visitor can select, so that line has never been drawn for anyone.
So the most informative cell in my own dataset renders, today, nowhere. I didn’t hide it. I just never built the thing that would have shown it, and I’d been shipping this CSV for months without once counting Ukraine’s rows.
What the dollar price actually did
Here’s the part that stopped me.
January 2022 — 69 hryvnia, at 28.3673 to the dollar, so $2.43. The index put the hryvnia 51.7% below the dollar.
July 2026 — 149 hryvnia, at 44.6702, so $3.34. The hryvnia sits 46.4% below the dollar.
Four and a half years, and the index moved 5.37 percentage points. That’s it. Five points — call it a rounding error with a passport. I ran every market present in both editions and ranked them by how far their valuation gap travelled. Ukraine comes twelfth out of 54 — twelfth most stable. The median market moved 10.53 points, roughly double.
The country that moved most over the same stretch was Turkey, at 74.15 points — and Turkey was not at war. Over those same nine editions its Big Mac went from ₺24.99 to ₺325, thirteen times over, while the lira lost 71% of its dollar value. Turkish valuation swung from 63.0% below the dollar to 11.1% above it. Ukraine, under invasion the entire time, moved one-fourteenth as far.
Hand someone this index with the country names stripped out and ask them to point at the war. They point at Turkey.
Why the index went quiet
The hryvnia is why — and the mechanism is administrative, not economic.
The National Bank of Ukraine fixed the official rate on 24 February 2022 and held it. It devalued 25% in a single step to 36.5686 on 21 July 2022, then held that for over a year, until moving to managed flexibility on 3 October 2023 (Ukrainska Pravda; daily official rates are published by the NBU).
You can watch the peg in the CSV without knowing any of that. The January 2023 survey used 36.917. The July 2023 survey used 36.93145. Between two consecutive editions of a global currency index, in the middle of a full-scale war, Ukraine’s exchange rate moved 0.039%.
The Big Mac Index divides a local price by an exchange rate. Pin the denominator — by decree, on a Thursday, at a number chosen in a meeting — and the index quietly stops reporting on the country and starts reporting on the policy. That’s not a flaw anyone hid. It’s just what the arithmetic does, and our methodology page spells out the same dependency.
There’s a Chinese story for this: 刻舟求剑 — a man drops his sword over the side of a moving boat, cuts a notch in the gunwale to mark the spot, and dives at the notch once the boat has docked. The mark is precise. The reference frame moved.
Ukraine already tested this
The strongest evidence isn’t a comparison with Turkey. It’s a comparison with Ukraine.
Look at 2014 and 2015 in the same series. The hryvnia went from 8.379 to the dollar in January 2014 to 15.822 in January 2015 — an 89% depreciation inside twelve months. The dollar price of a Ukrainian Big Mac fell from $2.27 to $1.20, down 47%. The valuation gap blew out from 46.5% below the dollar to 72.0% below — a 25.5-point lurch across two editions. The menu price then ran from ₴19 to ₴34 by mid-2015, up 79%.
Now put the two eras side by side. Across the ten editions from January 2013 to July 2017, Ukraine’s valuation gap ranged over 29.90 points. Across the nine editions from January 2022 to July 2026, it ranged over 7.13 points.
Same country. Same conflict. The index registered the earlier, smaller phase four times more violently than the later, larger one — which is exactly backwards from what anyone would predict.
What changed in between was the exchange-rate regime, not the fighting. In 2014 the hryvnia floated and fell; in 2022 it was pinned on day one. So when someone says the Big Mac Index shows Ukraine holding up, what it actually shows is that the NBU held the rate. Those are not the same sentence.
I had the freeze story backwards
My first draft of this argued something tidier: that war makes menu prices freeze, that companies stop repricing when the ground is moving, and that the burger therefore measures political tolerance rather than inflation. Israel looked like the proof. ₪17 held for 14 consecutive editions, from July 2018 to January 2025 — six and a half years without a single agora of movement — then ₪17 to ₪20 to ₪23, up 35.3% in eighteen months. Israeli papers covered the jump when the July 2026 edition landed (Globes).
Two forces did that ₪23, not one. The menu went up 35.3%, and the shekel got 20.2% stronger against the dollar over the same eighteen months — 3.60575 to 2.9993. Stack them and Israel’s dollar price runs $4.71 to $7.67, a 62.7% jump on a burger that got 35% dearer.
One caveat on that Globes piece, and on the half-dozen Israeli outlets that ran the same line: they call it the second most expensive Big Mac in the world. In the file I work from it’s fifth — behind Switzerland at $9.04, Uruguay at $8.94, Norway at $8.05 and Colombia at $8.00. I can’t account for the gap, and I’m not going to pretend I can. The direction is the same either way.
Then I queried every unbroken flat run in the whole file, all 45 editions, and my tidy argument fell over.
The longest freeze in the dataset belongs to Switzerland — CHF 6.50, unchanged for 16 straight editions, January 2015 to July 2022. Taiwan matched Israel at 14. Denmark ran 12, Peru 11. Not one of them was at war. Israel’s remarkable stillness turns out to be second place in a table topped by the most placid economy in Europe.
And Ukraine, the actual war case, did the opposite of freezing. It changed its Big Mac price at every single edition from January 2022 through July 2026 — eight consecutive increases, no repeats, ₴69 to ₴149. Local reporting picks up the same behaviour on the ground: McDonald’s Ukraine raised prices again in May 2026, with the Big Mac up 20–25 hryvnia (UA.NEWS, 19 May 2026). The Economist’s July reading is a ₴10 increase on January’s, which is smaller than that report implies — different survey timing, probably, and I can’t reconcile the two exactly.
So: does war freeze menu prices? No — and the country actually being invaded repriced more often than almost anyone. Long freezes happen everywhere, mostly for dull reasons I’ve written about at length in why menu prices barely move. I went looking for a war signature and found ordinary corporate behaviour in a dramatic costume.
The hryvnia was never the story
Strip the dollar out and Ukraine’s burger has plenty to say.
₴69 to ₴149 is +115.9% in four and a half years. That’s the sixth-largest local-currency increase among the 54 markets in both editions, behind only Venezuela, Argentina, Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt. The median market managed +32.9%. It also outruns Ukraine’s own headline inflation by a wide margin — annual CPI was 7.7% in July 2026 (Trading Economics), and cumulative CPI over the period doesn’t get anywhere near doubling.
Meanwhile the dollar price rose only 37.1%, because the hryvnia lost 57.5% against the dollar over the same window — most of it in two administered steps rather than a market slide.
So the war is in there. It’s in the local column — where a burger more than doubled while official inflation ran single digits for most of the stretch. The dollar conversion is what erases it, and the dollar conversion is the entire index.
When nothing moves and the number still does
One more case, because it makes the failure mode unmistakable.
Saudi Arabia has sold the Big Mac at SAR 19 for 8 consecutive editions, January 2023 to July 2026. The riyal is pegged: 3.7545 then, 3.755 now. Two numbers, both frozen, for four years.
Its index valuation over that period went from 5.6% below the dollar to 18.7% below — a 13.07-point move, more than twice Ukraine’s 5.37.
Where did Saudi Arabia’s 13 points come from? The United States. The American Big Mac went from $5.36 to $6.22, up 16.04%, which drags the implied parity rate from 3.5448 down to 3.0547 while the market rate sits still. Nothing in Saudi Arabia changed. The number moved because Chicago got more expensive.
Lebanon shows the same shape at a stranger scale. LBP 480,000 and a peg that rounds to 89,550 have both been fixed for four editions — the dollar price has come out at $5.36 to the cent every single time — and the valuation still drifted 6.4 points. Same cause, same direction, entirely imported. A country whose currency went from LBP 6,500 to LBP 480,000 a burger in eight years is now, on this measure, a passenger in someone else’s economy.
If a pegged, frozen, nothing-happening country can post a bigger index move than a country in its fifth year of war, the index is not measuring what a casual reader thinks it measures.
What I’d watch instead
Not the dollar price, and not the valuation gap. Both are dominated by the exchange-rate regime, and in wartime the exchange-rate regime is a decision somebody makes in a room.
Watch the local column against the local CPI. Ukraine’s burger doubled while its official inflation ran single digits for most of the period, and that spread — not the price, not the gap, the spread — is the only thing in this dataset that behaves like a war economy. Everything else is arithmetic about the dollar.
And keep the missing row visible. Ukraine’s country page is getting a price history, with July 2022 left blank and the reason printed beside it — a chart that ran smoothly through the seven months when every McDonald’s in the country was shut would be telling you something false in a very confident voice.
Right now that chart doesn’t run smoothly. It doesn’t run.
刻舟求剑.