The Donetsk police have prevented yet another attempt to ship local girls abroad to force them into prostitution. They apprehended a 42-year-old recruiter, who turned out to be a Russian citizen from Rostov-on-Don. The criminal tried to smuggle two young girls to the neighboring country, his victims being naive enough to believe an experienced pimp’s fables about easy money and prospects of “careers in show business.” According to the deputy chief of the Anti-Trafficking Department of the Donetsk Regional Internal Affairs Administration Andrii Nebytov, the trafficker supplied “live merchandise” to an extensive network of underground brothels, covering the southern regions of European Russia. He visited the Donbas regularly, reasonably believing he would easily be able to find some objects for his transactions.
This case is, unfortunately, a typical episode in the chronicle of the criminal trade in Donetsk women. In particular, the same day, a 50-year-old Turk was arrested red-handed in the “miners’ capital”; he established an illegal export channel for shipping sex slaves to Istanbul. A few days earlier still, two female pimps were detained at a border checkpoint in Dolzhansky, Luhansk region, while escorting a large group of Donetsk women aged 17 to 24 years. The list goes on and on...
The Donetsk police credibly argue that sex traffickers worked out a complex system that allows them to conduct the wide-ranging, risky but highly lucrative business. The “personnel” to be sent abroad is usually recruited from poor, disadvantaged families.
Why do slavers like the miners’ land so much? First, all visitors to the region agree that Donetsk women are amazingly beautiful. Dozens of nations and nationalities mixed together in this interethnic melting pot, resulting in wild beauty beyond any expectations.
According to experts, the famous Donbas mentality features not only increased pragmatism, but also a critical attitude to the norms of traditional morality. Furthermore, most industrial cities and towns are decaying and suffering from high unemployment, pushing their inhabitants to flee to whatever place they can.
“Most recruited women are shipped from Donetsk to Moscow, as well as Turkey, Egypt, and Israel,” one of the department’s experts agreed to tell us about the intricacies of the criminal enterprise. “Why is it so? The reason is simple: to get to Russia you do not even need an international passport. And in Turkey, as you know, they do not ask for visas, as a passport and 20 dollars on the border are enough for them. For other eastern countries, the scheme is more complicated: first, the girls get tourist permits and are sent south, overseas, under supervision. Then the Bedouins carry them through the desert for a few days, to a secret point where a pimp from a big city with a cross-country vehicle waits for his ‘live merchandise’. The passport of the victim is taken away upon arrival to the first station abroad, so she is deprived of her rights and defenseless from that time on. The recruiters call them ‘the meat.’”
Arriving in foreign brothels, the sex slaves face a gruesome lot. After miraculously managing to escape back home, one such poor wretch decided to tell reporters about her bitter journey. As a member of a fictitious travelers’ group that included other girls who were as naive as she was, she flew to a Middle Eastern country, where they had been promised temporary jobs as resort hotel maids for “new Russians.” However, upon arrival, it soon started to resemble a horror movie: a cramped windowless barrack where they were locked at night, twelve hours of the “work” in the local brothels, abuse, humiliation, complete hopelessness.
Back home, in the Donbas, the victims avoid attention, not only embarrassed by the potential condemnation by a part of the community, but also because of a well-founded fear of recruiters that may suddenly appear and punish them for “breach of contract.”
Volunteers working for NGOs look for these former prostitutes, aiming to integrate these women into society, protect them, and provide psychological or legal assistance. But those volunteers anxiously state: so far, despite all their efforts, the flow of sex migration is still strong in both directions: healthy girls, full of life, go there, while broken, sick and desperate creatures come back, having been transformed, in effect, into some sort of “human sludge,” ejected by the soulless machine of the criminal business.
* Roxolana was the name given by 16th-century Europeans to Hurrem Sultan, Ottoman empress of Ukrainian origin, who was captured by Tatar raiders as a young girl and sold to Turkey as a harem slave. Now the word is used to refer to Ukrainian women working as prostitutes abroad, often in slave-like conditions.
