War crime tour for £3,000: The tourists flocking to gawp at Ukraine’s horror

Is this so-called ‘dark tourism’ a macabre form of voyeurism or a useful way to highlight war crimes?

In the spring of 2022, the Ukrainian town of Bucha was subject to a brutal invasion by Russian forces. The initial battle for the town, perched on the eastern outskirts of Kyiv, saw 1,400 civilians killed. Moscow’s troops still stand accused of committing a litany of war crimes throughout the month-long occupation that followed.
But now its devastated streets have become a summer holiday hotspot – at least for a certain cache of tourists. Bucha has drawn in visitors as a so-called “dark tourism” site, one of many places around the world which attract people for the tragic or sinister events associated with them. Such landmarks make up a macabre global industry worth £25 billion by some estimates. 
At least a dozen companies now offer tours of Bucha as well as Irpin, where at least 290 civilians were murdered by Russian forces, and other formerly occupied areas of Ukraine.
Curious visitors began arriving almost as soon as the areas were liberated from Russia’s control, it seems. “I was scared in the beginning because I was uncertain what it would be like, and there were always sirens and alarms every day,” says 29-year-old Stephan, from Germany, who visited Bucha in August 2022, just five months after Russian forces withdrew from the town. “You would just see a few rockets intercepted by air defence, and you would never know what could happen.”
Stephan, who runs a YouTube channel called My Expat Diary, which features videos about his trips to Afghanistan and North Korea as well as more typical holiday destinations like Japan, Greece and Europe, made his way to Bucha by finding locals in Kyiv who were willing to drive with him to the town and show him around. What he found surprised and appalled him in equal measure. 
“Around 80 per cent of it looked unharmed,” Stephan says. “[But] I interviewed some people there about Russia’s atrocities, and it was very horrible. It was the most disturbing place I’ve been to in Ukraine. One guy told me about how his neighbour had been killed.” He doesn’t consider himself a “dark tourist” but did have a “personal interest” in seeing Bucha for himself after reading reports about its occupation from Colombia, where he was staying when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. “I was also hoping to generate hits on YouTube and to show others what it was like,” he says.
Far from shunning those like Stephan who want to witness Ukraine’s tragedies up close, many in the war-torn nation are keen to show the world the destruction that Russia has wrought, says Ukrainian lawyer Dmytro Nykyforov, 33. 
Originally from Oleshky, near Kherson, Nykyforov fled to Kyiv as a refugee early in the war. He now operates guided visits to Bucha and Irpin, with a starting price of about £215 per person, and says he is “happy” to see others offering similar services online.
“I’m one of many Ukranians who has become used to the war, so I’m not upset if we have tourists who want to see what is happening here,” Nykyforov explains. “The main idea is to share our experiences with them and help them to find out more about the war,” he says.
War Tours, Nykyforov’s company, pays a wage to its tour guides – who are refugees themselves – and regularly donates funds to the war effort. But some of his competitors appear to be raking in the cash: one week-long “war tour” package reportedly offered to tourists comes with a £3,000 price tag. 
Most of Nykyforov’s clients are from the US, Britain or “small European countries”, he says, and interest in tours has risen this summer. “I think they deserve to see what’s happening here because their governments support Ukraine, and they pay for that with their taxes,” he says, adding “people have a right to know how their money is spent.” 
It would seem that the Ukrainian government is also keen to attract visitors. In March, the country announced a campaign to attract tourists, saying it had the infrastructure and hotels to welcome foreign travellers, albeit when the war was over. “Any money that people will spend in Ukraine will help the economy to recover,” said tourism boss Mariana Oleskiv. 
“Now the brand of Ukraine [is] developed and well known around the world, but it’s not associated with tourism,” she added, imploring sightseers to visit areas of the country that have remained unoccupied during the conflict and are “very beautiful”. 
But while it may not have the reputation of neighbouring Hungary and Poland, which welcome millions of visitors a year to the likes of Warsaw, Krakow and Budapest, Ukraine has for more than a decade been a hotspot for dark tourism owing to its decision to reopen the Chernobyl exclusion zone in 2011.
More than 70,000 people visited the disaster-ravaged area in 2021, with numbers peaking at almost 125,000 in 2019, three years before the war broke out.
The site was abandoned after an enormous nuclear disaster in 1986 and only reopened to the public when radiation levels were deemed to be safe enough for human exposure.
“There are things to see there if one follows the official route and doesn’t stray away from the group,” said Emergency Situations Ministry spokeswoman Yulia Yershova at the time – “though it is a very sad story.”
By 2015, a handful of companies had sprung up to bus dark tourists from Kyiv to Chernobyl, around 60 miles from the capital. Visitors were also provided with their own geiger counters in return for a small fee. 
At least one such company has now added Bucha and Irpin to its listings: a site called Chernobyl Story offers a “de-occupied cities tour” of Hostomel, Irpin, Bucha and Romanivka for £140, along with private tours of Chernobyl for just over £600. Chernobyl Story gives “a percentage of the purchase amount as a donation to orphanages”, its website states. 
Nykyforov insists that visitors to the sites aren’t driven by morbid curiosity, but rather a desire to see the devastation the war has wrought for themselves, unfiltered.
“People are interested in seeing Bucha because it’s evidence of Russian aggression in their own eyes, rather than just through the media,” he explains. But “they also wanted to see destroyed Russian vehicles, and the different kinds of drones used by both sides, as well as the famous exhibitions in Kyiv”. 
Like Nykyforov, refugee Maria Romanenko, 31, doesn’t think there’s necessarily a problem with “dark tourism” itself. “People have always been drawn to suffering parts of the world in that sense,” says Romanenko, who now lives in Manchester and offers walking tours of the city for other Ukranians in Britain. 
Her tours of Manchester cover the site of the 1996 IRA bombing on Commercial Street, as “it always interests people to see how an area recovers”. But she also points out that “tour companies need to be audited and monitored” to ensure that “nobody is profiteering” – a difficult task after two and a half years of fighting off Moscow’s forces, she says.
Still, she’s clear that the benefits of welcoming in visitors – in the right places, with careful planning – outweigh any potential negatives. “The economy has suffered a lot in the last two and a half years,” Romanenko says. “The need for investment is very high, with big chunks of the country left in ruins after bombing and the fire of artillery.”
Besides the destruction, she adds, Ukraine also has much more to offer. “There are wonderful restaurants which hardly get any visitors” as well as shops, historic cultural attractions and areas of immense natural beauty. Later this year, Romanenko will take a group of Brits from Manchester and London to Lviv, a major civilian hub in the west of the country which has largely been spared the worst of Russia’s offensive.
Ultimately, however, “no area is fully safe because you don’t know when and where exactly a bomb can hit,” Romanenko says. “I have concerns about such tours [near Kyiv],” she adds. “It’s a huge level of responsibility to say come, we’ll show you around, when there are constant air raid sirens.”