How the sex trade preys on Ukraine’s refugees

Five weeks into Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, imagine for a moment what it’s like to live there now.

Bombs, bloodshed, trauma. No school for your children, no healthcare for your parents, no safe roof over your head in many parts of the country.

Would you try to run? Ten million Ukrainians have, according to the United Nations.

Most seek refuge in other areas of Ukraine, believed to be safer. But more than three and a half million people have fled over the border.

They are mainly women and children, as men under the age of 60 are obliged by the Ukrainian government to stay put and fight.

Displaced and disoriented, often with no idea where to go next, refugees are forced to put their trust in strangers.

The chaos of war is now behind them, but the truth is, they’re not entirely safe outside Ukraine either.

“For predators and human traffickers, the war in Ukraine is not a tragedy,” UN Secretary General António Guterres warned on Twitter. “It’s an opportunity – and women and children are the targets.”

Trafficking rings are notoriously active in Ukraine and neighbouring countries in peace time. The fog of war is perfect cover to increase business.

Karolina Wierzbińska, a coordinator at Homo Faber, a human rights organisation based in Lublin, told me children were a huge concern.

Many youngsters were travelling out of Ukraine unaccompanied, she said. Patchy registration processes in Poland and other border regions – especially at the start of the war – meant children disappeared, their current whereabouts unknown.

My colleagues and I headed down to the Polish-Ukrainian border to see for ourselves.

At a train station, well known for refugee arrivals, we found a hive of activity. Dazed-looking women and crying children were all around.

Many were being comforted and offered hot food from steaming industrial-sized cooking pots by an army of volunteers wearing high-vis gilets.

So far, so well organised, right? Not quite.

We met Margherita Husmanov, a Ukrainian refugee from Kyiv in her early 20s. She arrived at the border two weeks ago, but decided to stay on, to help stop fellow refugees falling into the wrong hands.

I asked her if she felt vulnerable. “Yes,” she told me. “That’s especially why I worry about their safety.

“The women and children come here from a terrible war. They don’t speak Polish or English. They don’t know what’s going on and they believe what anyone tells them.

“Anyone can turn up at this station. The first day I volunteered, we saw three men from Italy. They were looking for beautiful women to sell into the sex trade.

“I called the police and it turned out I was right. It wasn’t paranoia. It’s horrible.”

Margherita says local officials are a bit more organised now. Police regularly patrol the station. The people (mainly men, we’re told) with cardboard signs to tempting destinations, so present in the first couple of weeks of refugee arrivals, have largely disappeared.

But as we find out from a number of sources, other ill-intentioned individuals are now posing as high-vis-wearing volunteers.

Elena Moskvitina spoke out on Facebook to raise awareness. She’s now safely in Denmark, so we chatted at length via Skype. Her experience is chilling.

She and her children crossed into neighbouring Romania from war-torn Ukraine. They were looking for a lift away from the border.

What she described as fake volunteers at a refugee centre asked where she was staying.

They turned up later in the day and aggressively told her Switzerland was the best place to go and that they’d give her a lift there, with a van full of other women.

Elena told me the men looked at her and her daughter “sleazily”. Her daughter was petrified.

They asked her to show them her son, who was in another room. They looked him up and down, she said. They then insisted she travel with no-one else except them, and they got angry when she asked to see their ID cards.

To get the men away from her family, Elena promised to meet them when the other women were in their van. But as soon as they left, she told me, she grabbed her children and ran. Credit: BBC