Ukraine: sex, secrecy and security amid all-out battles

KAMIANSKE, Ukraine – As the air raid sirens died down, Olena left the shelter and returned to the side of the road, waiting for clients looking for sex..

With the fall of the Russian bombs, social workers have seen HIV treatment decline and needy people disappear from the streets.

And when soldiers approached Tetyana, usually armed, they often demanded discounts that she didn’t feel sure to refuse. “The soldiers say, ‘Tanya, come for an hour,'” she says, but then they ask for more time. “I’m going to entertain them all night for the same money.”

The Russian invasion has affected every city, industry and occupation in Ukraine, killing thousands of civilians and displacing millions from their homes. Sex sellers, a particularly vulnerable population even in peacetime, are most at risk of poverty, coercion and health risks, with implications for Ukraine’s fight to curb the spread of HIV, say prostitutes and social workers .

Prostitution is illegal but widely tolerated in Ukraine, one of Europe’s most popular destinations for pre-war sex tourism. The industry was widespread, with about 53,000 sex workers, according to the government-run Center for Public Health of Ukraine.

The war greatly reduced the income of workers and severely disrupted drug addiction and HIV treatment aid programs. Before the invasion, Ukraine had a high number of HIV-positive people, and this was a priority for the country’s health services.

According to the health center, about a third of people who were eligible for HIV or drug addiction help before the war were no longer receiving it by the end of the summer. The war has undone years of progress towards safer practices, social workers said.

But several prostitutes, interviewed on the condition that they would not reveal their names for fear of their families and the police, said they needed the job to survive.

“On the first day of the war, I didn’t come here”Olena said by the side of a road near Kamianske in central Ukraine. “But the second one does.”

Another woman, Liudmyla, said she was now earning about $6 an hour, half what she was before the war. “Even my regular customers couldn’t come to me because they didn’t have any money,” she said.

Several female workers said the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of men in Ukraine changed business: soldiers invaded cities and guns became the order of the day.

Lyudmyla said so some soldiers had been especially kind, bringing tips and flowers, but other women have expressed their fear. Olena said she wouldn’t get in the car with more than one man.

Tetyana said some men refuse to pay full price. “Sometimes a man promises $12, I do my job, but he only pays me $7,” she said. “He tells me: ‘Hey, now I earn less’, and I answer him: ‘Well, don’t come to me'”.

The war greatly reduced the number of foreign customerssaid a worker named Rita, who supports two small children. Vlada, who works at the same brothel and said she helps take care of her mother and siblings, said she went from 18 clients a day to about seven.

“Customers tipped us so much that we forgot to collect our salary,” he explains. “Now $40 is all we have after giving half to the owner of the business.”

This was stated by Denys, who lives in the capital Kiev and works mainly with gay men he lived on the subway during the first weeks of the war, avoiding bombing but earning nothing.

Even after that, business was slow. “People are mentally exhausted,” she says. “They’re tired of living with these air raid sirens. They have other priorities than just being with me.”

Now try to recover lost income by helping social workers, whose scarce resources have been deeply affected by the war.

In the city of Dnipro, The Virtus charity registered 2,300 prostitutesbut many others have moved to the city fleeing the fighting, according to Iryna Tkachenko, a social worker at Virtus.

“It takes time to build trust,” she says.

With supply chains disrupted, social workers have fewer condoms to hand out and fewer clean needles to keep addicts from sharing them.

The spread of HIV is a major concern for social workers.

Antiretroviral treatment helps reduce transmission from workers to customers and therefore to society at large. But over the past year, some 40 Ukrainian HIV treatment centers have stopped workingabout half due to bomb damage, according to the health center.

Another woman named Tetyana, a social worker who has been helping prostitutes in Kamianske for 15 years, distributes what she can and reminds them to take their medicine.

“We put a lot of effort into teaching them to take care of themselves,” she says. “I know them all like a mother, but often they don’t listen”.

And he adds: “I’m staying here and trying to protect them.”

c.2023 The New York Times Society