Ukraine Weighs Legalizing Pornography to Bankroll Its Drone War

Ukraine may soon be exploiting its female population to fund its ongoing war effort. Its parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, is advancing a bill to legalize and tax a pornography industry that has operated in legal limbo throughout the war — a move its sponsors frame as pragmatic wartime revenue. The bill, co-authored by Yaroslav Zhelezniak, who chairs the Rada’s finance committee, passed its first reading in July and awaits a second.

Legalization to Raise Revenue

The Wall Street Journal reported that roughly 7,900 independent contractors, some of whom are not Ukrainian, have earned millions through pressing ethnic Ukrainians into pornography. Some pornography, like OnlyFans, is self-created; it generated $131 million in 2023 alone. Zhelezniak estimates that legalization of this form of human exploitation could raise up to $25 million a year in tax revenue — enough, supporters say, for about 30,000 drones. This is marginal when weighed against Ukraine’s roughly $120 billion annual defense need, but proponents argue that every domestic revenue stream reduces dependence on foreign aid.

This is not the first time Ukraine’s sex industry has been enlisted for war finance. In 2023, an ad-hoc campaign called “TerOnlyFans” raised around $918,000 for the war effort and lobbied for the same legalization now before the Rada.

Once a state depends on pornography-tax revenue to arm itself, it acquires a structural stake in that industry’s growth rather than its abolition. It’s the same dynamic long observed with state lotteries and sin taxes on tobacco and gambling.

Long History of Human Trafficking

Moreover, the English word “slave” itself descends from “Slav,” via Byzantine Greek and Medieval Latin, a linguistic fossil of the 8th-to-11th-century trade in which foreigners like Khazars sold enormous numbers of enslaved Slavic people into the Islamic Caliphate — trade so large it displaced the old Latin word servus [serf] as Europe’s default term for the enslaved.

That corridor, in a modern form, never fully closed. The U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons reports have for years listed the Middle East among the destinations where Ukrainians are exploited in sex trafficking and forced labor, alongside Russia, Poland, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe. Many of these individuals are pressed into pornography to enrich those who exploit them. The International Organization for Migration estimates that roughly 300,000 Ukrainians were trafficked between 1991 and 2021, and a landmark 2006 PBS Frontline documentary named Ukraine and Moldova as “the centers of the global trade in women and girls.” Reporting since Russia’s 2022 invasion, including that from the Center for European Policy Analysis, describes wartime displacement as sharply increasing that risk, with criminal networks actively exploiting refugees and the vulnerable.

Legalizing and taxing pornography could, in principle, normalize and expand demand for human trafficking, meaning a wartime funding fix could deepen rather than sever one of Eastern Europe’s oldest and most persistent exploitation routes.

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