Ukrainian tour companies cashing in on conflict – media

30.11.2024 17:54

Photo: Getty Images / Danilo Antoniuk

With Ukraine’s tourism industry hammered by the conflict with Russia, a number of enterprising guides have found a new source of revenue – showing curious Westerners around battlefields and bomb sites, sometimes for an exorbitant fee.

There are around a dozen such companies catering to the so-called ‘dark tourism’ market, according to various Western media reports over the last year. One such outfit, WarTours Ukraine, told France’s AFP news agency this week that it has had around 30 customers since January, mostly Americans and Europeans.

According to its website, WarTours will show visitors “destroyed military equipment” and “the consequences of missile strikes” around Kiev for €150 ($158). For €250, the company will bring tourists to the towns of Irpin and Bucha to see a “cemetery of destroyed cars” and hear tales of alleged Russian war crimes. For an undisclosed fee, WarTours will take visitors to Kharkov, where Russian forces killed at least 40 foreign fighters of the infamous Kraken Ukrainian nationalist unit in a missile strike last week.

Every tour has a propaganda component, with WarTours promising meetings with “witnesses of Russian crimes” and the company of “a certified guide [who] will tell you everything you need to know about the war.”

WarTours co-founder Dmitry Nikiforov told AFP that his business is “not about money, it’s about memorialization of the war.” Other tour operators echoed his statement, with Kiev-based Capital Tours telling the news agency that its €120 ‘Horrors of Russian Occupation’ package is intended to “prevent this from ever happening again.” Both firms donate a portion of their earnings to the Ukrainian military.

The Ukrainian government has seemingly realized the propaganda value of taking busloads of Westerners to the sites of supposed war crimes. Mariana Oleskiv, the head of the National Agency for Tourism Development, told AFP that her agency provides specific training to guides and is preparing “memorial tours” in Kiev and its surrounds.

Russia maintains that the alleged massacre of civilians at Bucha in March 2022 was a Ukrainian false-flag operation designed to derail peace talks which were taking place in Istanbul at the time. Moscow insists that the killings took place after its forces had left the town, and has called for a UN investigation into the incident. Russia accused Ukraine of plotting a similar operation in Irpin before its forces left the city in April 2022. Within days of the Russian pullout, the Ukrainian military claimed to have found hundreds of bodies, which the Russian Defense Ministry said were pulled from morgues and strewn in the streets for Western media.

While WarTours and Capital Tours charge a modest fee for their services, and avoid travel to the front lines, other companies are less scrupulous. One firm contacted by The Telegraph in August offers a week-long “war tour” for €3,600, while others contacted by AFP run multi-day excursions to the area of Ukraine’s disastrous 2023 counteroffensive for €3,300.

Another company which formerly ran tours to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) has announced that it is already taking bookings for visits to the Kursk NPP, despite the facility being located deep inside Russia’s Kursk Region. The Ukrainian military launched a surprise invasion of Kursk Region in August, an operation that has cost 36,000 men to date, according to the latest figures from the Russian Defense Ministry.

Although the Kursk NPP remains firmly under Russian control, the company claims that it has already received orders to visit the plant from tourists in the US and UK.