When the air raid warning sirens stopped, Olena exited the bunker and headed back to the sidewalk, where she waited for clients looking for sex. When the Russian bombs fell, social workers noticed a drop in HIV treatments. The people who needed them disappeared from the streets.
When soldiers approached Tetiana, usually armed, they often asked for discounts that she couldn’t bring herself to deny. “The soldiers would say, ‘Tania, come for an hour,'” she says, but then asks for more time. “I end up going and entertaining her all night for the same money.”
The Russian invasion affected every city, industry and professionals in every sector in Ukraine, killing thousands of civilians and forcing millions more to flee their homes. People who sell sex, a particularly vulnerable group even in peacetime, are at even greater risk of poverty, coercion and ill health, say sex workers and social workers.
And this situation has consequences for Ukraine’s fight to stop the spread of HIV.
In the country, one of the biggest prewar sex tourism destinations in Europe, prostitution is illegal but largely tolerated. According to the State Health Center of Ukraine, the sex industry was large, involving an estimated 53,000 professionals.
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The war severely reduced the incomes of these professionals and disrupted drug addiction and HIV treatment programs. Before the invasion, the country had a large number of people with the virus, and the fight against HIV was one of the public health priorities.
According to the health center, as of the summer of 2022 in the northern hemisphere, a third of people who were eligible for prewar help to fight disease and drug addiction were no longer receiving that help. The war has undone years of progress toward safer practices.
But several sex workers who agreed to interviews on the condition that only their first names be used out of concern for family members and fear of the police said they needed the job to survive. “I didn’t come here on the first day of the war,” said Olena, who was interviewed on a street near Kamianske in central Ukraine. “But on the second day, yes.”
Another woman, Liudmila, said she now charges US$6 (R$30) an hour, half of what she was paid before the war. “Even my regular customers couldn’t come to me because they didn’t have any money,” she says.
Several experts said that the military mobilization of hundreds of thousands of men changed the profile of their work. Soldiers invaded cities and guns were everywhere.
Liudmila claims some soldiers were friendly and brought tips and flowers. On the other hand, Olena says she doesn’t get into a car if there’s more than one man in the vehicle, and Tetiana said some refuse to pay the agreed price. “Sometimes someone promises me $12 [R$ 60]I do my job but he only pays me $7 [R$ 35]. He says ‘I’m making less money now’ and I say ‘so don’t come and find me’.”
The war has greatly reduced the number of foreign customers, says a worker named Rita, who is raising two young children. Vlada, who works at the same brothel and said he helps support his mother and siblings, said he has gone from 18 customers a day to about seven.
“In the past, clients have tipped us so much that we forgot to collect our paychecks,” she says. “Now, after giving the homeowner half, we only get $40 [R$ 203].”
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Denis lives in the capital Kyiv and mainly works with gay men. He said that during the first weeks of the war he lived in a subway station to avoid bombing, but without earning anything. Even after that, the movement was slow. “People are mentally exhausted,” he said. “You’re sick of those air raid sirens. You have other priorities than going out with me.”
To compensate for the lost income, Denis is now trying to help social workers whose meager resources have been severely depleted by the war. In Dnipro, the Virtus charity has registered 2,300 sex workers. But according to a social worker, Irina Tkachenko, far larger numbers came to the city to flee the fighting. “It takes time to build trust.”
With supply chains not functioning normally, social workers have to distribute fewer condoms and fewer syringes to prevent drug users from sharing them.
One of the biggest concerns of social workers is the spread of HIV. Treatment with antiretroviral drugs is helping to reduce transmission, but in the past 12 months around 40 of the country’s treatment centers have shut down, in half the cases because they were damaged by bombs.
Another woman named Tetiana, a social worker who has been working with sex workers in Kamianske for 15 years, is giving out what she can and recommending people to continue taking their medication.
“We try very hard to teach people how to take care of themselves,” she said. “I know everyone like I’m your mother, but they often don’t listen to me. I’ll stay here and try to protect her.”
Translated by Clara Allain
