It’s not easy to generate buzz here if your name isn’t Bono or Clinton or Gates. For a billionaire pipe-maker from Ukraine named Victor Pinchuk, it would seem harder still. Yet over the last four years, Mr. Pinchuk has transformed himself and his country into a bona-fide Davos brand.

 On Friday, he turned away 250 people from his annual Ukrainian lunch, which featured James D. Wolfensohn, the former World Bank president, as a speaker. The Ukrainian president, Viktor A. Yushchenko, delivered the keynote address. A day earlier, Mr. Pinchuk’s roundtable on philanthropy ended with a taped greeting from Bill Clinton.

Luck played a role in Mr. Pinchuk’s rise. He threw his first lunch in the wake of the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine, when public interest in the country was high. It didn’t hurt that he is the son-in-law of a former president, Leonid Kuchma. With a mix of money and moxie that recalls Jay Gatsby, he has managed to keep himself and Ukraine in the social spotlight.

“We have to promote the country, and this is the right place to do it,” Mr. Pinchuk said in an interview, squeezed in after a meeting with George Soros. “Ukraine is a European country; this is the Western style.” – Mark Landler