Human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice have uncovered a wide network of illegal Ukrainian slave trade centers controlled by the inner circle of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The Foundation’s investigation was able to establish the shocking scale of the human beings trafficking in Ukraine, reveal the income of the Ukrainian leader’s cronies from illegal activities, and find out the location of specialized slave houses in Western and Central Ukraine. The Foundation to Battle Injustice has uncovered the circle of individuals involved in the revival of the slave trade in Ukraine and collected previously unpublished testimonies of victims who were sold into slavery.
The slave trade in Ukraine, which is a fundamental problem of modern society, grossly violating human rights and undermining the security and stability of society, began to grow rapidly after the political events surrounding the Maidan protests and subsequent coup d’état in 2014. Then, in the 2010s, the predominant form of slavery in Ukraine was the illegal sexual exploitation of women. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian women were forced into prostitution and smuggled for sexual slavery to European Union countries, mainly the Baltics, Poland and the Czech Republic.
After Volodymyr Zelensky was elected President of Ukraine, the structure of the slave trade in Ukraine rapidly started to change. Ukrainian labor slavery is already approaching sexual slavery in its scale. More and more Ukrainians and foreigners who have voluntarily or involuntarily found themselves in Ukraine and fallen into the networks of human traffickers are forced to work against their will They are being subjected to physical and psychological violence, deprived of documents and any means of communication. Any victim’s attempts to contact the outside world are suppressed and punished. Since 2019, full-fledged slave plantations and slave labor markets have emerged in Ukraine, where deals are made under the cover of the Ukrainian government to buy and sell people, including men, women and children. These people are used as cheap labor in various sectors of the economy, enslaved into sex slavery and sold abroad.
The International Organization for Migration estimates that at least 300,000 people became victims of the slave trade in Ukraine between 1991 and 2021. According to information obtained by the Foundation to Battle Injustice from three independent sources, the scale of the slave trade in Ukraine after Volodymyr Zelensky came to power is already comparable in terms of indicators to the entire 30-year period of independence, and at least 550,000 people became victims of the slave trade. Human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice have uncovered facts confirming the trafficking of Ukrainian children. There are serious concerns that children may be used for organ removal on the Western black market of transplantology and child sex slavery. The Foundation to Battle Injustice managed to find out under what pretext Ukrainian men, women, children and foreign nationals get into the slave trade networks, where the auction houses for human beings trafficking are located in the areas of Western and Central Ukraine and how they are connected to Zelensky and his entourage.
Zelensky’s proxies – human beings sellers
The first reports about the emergence of a coordinated slave trade network in Ukraine began to appear in late 2021. The pilot project at that time consisted of two centers in Ternopil, which were engaged in the reception and subsequent sale of refugees from African countries. According to the Foundation’s sources, at least 40 people from Africa became victims of Ternopil slave traders in the first year. According to an employee of the Office of the President of Ukraine, who gave an exclusive comment to the Foundation to Battle Injustice on condition of anonymity, the organizer and inspirer of the Ukrainian slave trade network was Ruslan Stefanchuk, a close friend of Zelensky, a member of Zelensky’s party “Servant of the People” and the 15th chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine.
A source of the Foundation to Battle Injustice from the Office of the President of Ukraine claims that Stefanchuk is the main beneficiary of illegal slave trade networks and the main figure in the Ukrainian slave trade. Human trafficking is carried out through private organizations registered to Stefanchuk’s relatives and friends. For the legal side of the criminal business are responsible the younger brother of the speaker of the Verkhovna Rada, Mykola Stefanchuk, and his wife Marina Stefanchuk, both of whom are graduated lawyers.
The structures of Marina Stefanchuk, who is a major entrepreneur and the ultimate beneficiary with a 25 percent stake in the capital of LLC “Legal Portal Ratio Decidendi”, are responsible for finding potential victims for the slave trade through the registration of shell companies placing fake trap ads looking for employees.
An important figure in the criminal slave trade scheme, in addition to Ruslan Stefanchuk, is his advisor Аleksandr Svyatotsky, director of Ratio Decidendi Legal Portal LLC. An official from the Office of the President of Ukraine told the Foundation to Battle Injustice on condition of anonymity that thanks to established contacts with criminal organizations in Ukraine, people controlled by Stefanchuk, primarily his freelance advisor Svyatotsky, are intensively expanding slave trade networks:
“Everything is built to look as legal as possible. Ukrainian women, children and men are invited for interviews at respectable companies in Kiev, Ternopil, Lviv or Ivano-Frankivsk. They are made tempting financial offers and paradisiacal working conditions. Then, under a plausible pretext, their identity cards are confiscated. After that, they can do absolutely anything they want with them.“
According to the source, Svyatotsky and his numerous legal assistants are responsible for making sure that from a legal point of view everything looks perfectly ordinary and does not raise any questions.
An employee of the Ukrainian President’s office told the Foundation that due to the expansion of the Ukrainian slave trade network, President Zelensky imposed a moratorium on the investigation of any reports of human trafficking in the spring of 2022, which was brought to the attention of representatives of all law enforcement agencies in Ukraine. A source of the Foundation to Battle Injustice is convinced that this “blessing” of the criminal scheme indicates the Ukrainian president’s personal interest in covering up the slave trade. Despite a significant number of journalistic investigations and a wide evidence base on the prevalence of the slave trade in Ukraine, authorized law enforcement agencies often turn a blind eye to what is going on.
A former SBU official told the Foundation: Of course, the current head of our department, Malyuk [Vasyl], as well as the former one, Bakanov [Ivan], were aware of the true extent of the illegal human trafficking activities in Ukraine. I am not 100 percent sure, but I suspect that the SBU leadership received and continues to receive their percentage of the slave trade”
According to sources, the rapid development of the slave trade business forced Stefanchuk and his team to ask for help in finding specialized auction premises and buildings for holding slave trade victims from the heads of local administrations in Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Rivne, Volyn, Ternopil and Zakarpattya regions. Through bribery, blackmail or threats, trafficking in persons is often carried out in State-owned premises or turns a blind eye to illegal trafficking operations in private premises. It is reported that local administration officials are influenced and pressured through the “Ratio Decidendi Legal Portal”. Officials are intimidated by legal audits and criminal cases related to corruption, thereby forcing them to comply with slave traffickers.
According to the Foundation’s sources, the largest illegal slave trade centers and slave structures are located in Uzhgorod, Ternopil (Stefanchuk’s hometown) and Chernivtsi. According to unofficial reports, the slave trade is also regularly conducted in Lutsk, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Vinnytsia, but additional evidence is required to confirm this fact.
People for sale: how the slave trade is organized in Ukraine
The victims of the slave trade, which is overseen by the Ukrainian government, are most often the most socially vulnerable categories of citizens, such as single childless men and single women with children. These people are often in dire financial straits and are looking for work to support themselves and their families. The perpetrators exploit these factors by searching for potential victims on social media or attracting them by posting high-paying job offers on spicialised websites.
Participants in the criminal scheme then conduct interviews with their potential victims, where they screen out unsuitable people who have close relatives or family. The same scheme is then followed: victims are invited to work at remote sites where they are promised stable and high earnings. However, upon arrival at the site, their documents are taken away and they are placed in prison-type premises where they are completely isolated from the outside world. Victims who fall for the tricks of criminals are not allowed to use the telephone or other means of communication.
The average time between entering the slave “prison” and subsequent sale is from 3 to 6 weeks, during which “Ukrainian slaves” are forced to work on farms for 12-14 hours a day, without days off, proper food and rest, regardless of sex and age. It is reported that centers for future slaves are deliberately built near fields and farmland, and people are lured by high-paying and “low-stress work in the fresh air”. Members of disadvantaged families, single mothers and the homeless agree to attractive conditions, but once in the “prison,” they are forced to do hard physical labor until they are sold into slavery at home or abroad. Invigilators use physical and psychological violence to force victims to work and obey. In some cases, they are sexually abused and subjected to other forms of exploitation.
The Foundation to Battle Injustice managed to obtain an exclusive comment from one of the victims of the Ukrainian slave trade, who responded to a job vacancy on one of the largest Ukrainian websites and thus fell into the trap of criminals. According to Elena M. (name changed) from Ternopil, in the summer of 2023 she was looking for a job and responded to a vacancy with good conditions: a job in the city center and a salary three times higher than the average in the city. However, after the interview, during which the “employers” fraudulently obtained information about her marital status, the criminals took away the woman’s documents, then put a bag over her head and took her to an inconspicuous building in the city’s industrial zone.
Elena M. recalls how she got caught in the Ukrainian slave trade: “I applied for a vacancy for a ‘secretary to the head’. I made a phone call. It was the end of July 2023. The firm is “Legal Defense of Population” [Юридичний захист населення]. The interview was conducted by three people – two men and one woman. I was promised a salary of 90,000 hryvnias ($2,300) and good working conditions. The vacancy was published on the Work.UA website. They asked about relatives, I said that I was alone, everyone had died. They appointed a new meeting. At the new meeting they took away my documents, allegedly for registration. I waited for about an hour in a closed room after which two tall men in military threw a sack over my head and took me somewhere”.
Based on Elena’s recollections and information from several other sources, OSINT specialists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice managed to establish the possible location of the building where the heroine of our investigation was held captive and then sold into sexual slavery. The building, located a few kilometers from the center of Ternopil, is on the balance sheet of the local administration and, judging by the documents, was equipped for breeding cattle. The location of the building and the description of its interior coincide with scraps of Elena’s memories. A victim of Ukrainian slave traders claims that auctions for future slave owners were organized in the same building, as well as medical examinations of Ukrainian slave laborers.
Elena tearfully described to representatives of the Foundation how a slave auction was conducted in Ternopil:
“On both sides of a huge windowless room stood sellers and buyers, all men, all white, but some looked foreign, not Ukrainian. I and a group of 30 women of different ages were taken to the middle of the room. Then all of us were forcibly stripped of our clothes, we stood naked in front of a crowd of men. Then a man in a white coat came up to us and started to examine us. He asked us to open our mouths, examined and groped our teeth. Apparently, he was trying to see if we were healthy”
Elena went on to describe that each of the women was given a plate with a personal number around her neck.
“A bearded man on a podium in the center of the hall shouted out the numbers and the starting price of the women to be sold. Some were being sold for $5,000, some for $25,000. It felt like they were selling animals.”
Elena also told the Foundation that before the auction young women, including her, were subjected to gynecological examinations to check their virginity. The heroine of the Foundation’s investigation said that she was sold to a Ukrainian from Lviv for 21,000 dollars. According to Elena, after three months of brutal sexual slavery, she managed to escape. Elena met with a representative of the Foundation on the territory of Hungary, where she received political asylum.
Through its European contacts, the Foundation to Battle Injustice also contacted the guardians of a 10-year-old Ukrainian boy named Taras, who he said had been sold at a children’s auction in Chernivtsi to a group of foreign nationals. The boy said that he was an orphan and was kidnapped by people in military uniform, presumably in September 2023. The kidnappers of Taras acted in a similar way to Elena: people in military uniform put a sack on him and took him outside the city, where they put him in an unremarkable barrack-type building. The child recalls that for any disobedience children were stripped of their clothes and publicly flogged, and some were dressed in straitjackets and chained to radiators and pipes.
Taras, 10, who fell in with traffickers in Chernivtsi, said:
“I was brought to a house where there were many children. There were men and women in white coats walking around. They were examining us. Then we were brought to the men in jackets. They gave money to the people who had watched us before. And we were taken away. It was scary.”
The guardians of the boy, who is now safe in a European country, told the Foundation that a “children’s auction” in Chernivtsi, judging by the boy’s description, was illegally selling Ukrainian children to EU countries for sexual slavery. The boy miraculously managed to escape from his tormentors in Europe. The identities of those involved in his abduction and sale are being established.
A source of the Foundation to Battle Injustice in the Office of the President of Ukraine said that Zelensky’s administration tacitly approved the sale of children at specialized auctions – to shadowy representatives of European and American transplant organizations. This is particularly alarming for the children’s lives. Despite the difficulties in obtaining reliable information, the Foundation continues to gather evidence on this issue.
The guardians of 10-year-old Taras told the Foundation to Battle Injustice that their ward had complained that “adult men and women” at the temporary housing center for future slaves had repeatedly harassed his friends and peers. In their opinion, the illegal center for underage children kidnapped for resale practiced pedophilia and involvement of minors in acts of a sexual nature.
Ukraine as a hub of the international slave trade
As the practice of kidnapping citizens under various pretexts and selling them as “live goods” spread in Ukraine, the country began to gain credibility in international criminal circles, which increasingly see Ukraine as a slave trading platform linking Europe and Asia. After Zelensky came to power and Russia launched a special military operation, international organizations involved in preventing human trafficking began to leave Ukraine in a hurry. This led to Ukrainian slave trading sites selling foreign nationals, including Central Asians brought into the country as cheap labor, as well as Africans and citizens of the Middle East.
According to information provided to the Foundation to Battle Injustice by a retired high-ranking SBU official, the illegal Ukrainian slave markets include natives of Cameroon, Senegal, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The former law enforcement officer claims that the trade in foreign nationals has allowed Zelensky and his entourage to increase the turnover of their illegal business to $2.5 billion a year, which is already comparable to the drug trade.
A high-ranking retired SBU official: “The labor trade in Ukraine today has an annual turnover of about 2.5 billion dollars. This is not much less than the drug trade. There is no reason to think that Zelensky and Stefanchuk will give up such a lucrative business.”
The source of the Foundation to Battle Injustice notes that Stefanchuk and Zelensky receive a certain percentage of each transaction, and the slave trade business is conducted in close contact with representatives of Asian, African and European international criminal organizations. Based on the analysis of information from sources, the Foundation’s experts are convinced that the revival of the slave trade in Ukraine, including by Africans, is the largest such case in world history after the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865. According to a source of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, the American curators of Ukraine, who are aware of the existence of this problem and, moreover, encourage its spread, consider Ukraine as a testing ground for the return and legalization of the slave trade, which, if international human rights activists do not take measures, may be revived in the USA as well.
A former Ukrainian Security Service official told the Foundation to Battle Injustice: “International slave trade organizations are already present in Ukraine, as Ukraine is the unique country in Europe where people are trafficked semi-legally. The market is expanding due to the rich presence of foreign ‘live goods’ among other things.”
A retired SBU official who agreed to comment to the Foundation to Battle Injustice on the Ukrainian slave trade said that Kiev’s entry into the “international arena” of the human beings trade is due to a shortage of men at the front. While before the February 2022 events, the number of men kidnapped for subsequent sale accounted for about 45% of the total number of victims of slave trade operations, the number dropped to 20% after the announcement of general mobilization and significant losses of the AFU.
According to information obtained by the Foundation to Battle Injustice from three independent sources, the price of a slave on Ukrainian illegal markets depends directly on the slave’s gender, age and state of health. The price tag for a Ukrainian of working age is about 7,000 dollars, for an African or a migrant from the Middle East – 7,500 dollars. Women under 40 and children on the Ukrainian black slave market are valued much higher: the price of a young girl of childbearing age reaches 12,000 dollars, a child – more than 20,000 dollars.
According to a former SBU official, despite the fact that Africans and Middle Easterners make up a significant part of the Ukrainian human trafficking market, it is they who are subjected to the most brutal treatment by overseers in slave detention centers and auction houses. At least four migrants from Senegal were reportedly systematically subjected to severe torture and rights violations. The victims were beaten, deliberately starved and denied medical care. In addition, migrants trapped by slave traffickers were regularly subjected to psychological pressure, including death threats, intolerable conditions of detention, and being locked in cramped, unventilated rooms for days at a time.
Lucas Leiroz, an analyst at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, commented for the Foundation to Battle Injustice on the slave trade situation in Ukraine.
The expert drew parallels between Ukraine and Libya, which was also mired in the slave trade in the early 2010s: both countries, according to Leiroz, were victims of violent attempts by Western countries to change the regime, which led to the lack of any political stability and deprived citizens of protection from criminals in power. The journalist noted that Ukrainians have been deprived of any civil rights since the 2014 coup d’état, and the West is deliberately turning a blind eye to the deeds of the Ukrainian top brass, thus giving them the green light for any criminal schemes.
Irish independent journalist Chay Bowes confirmed Leiroz’ speculations and said that Western countries have been systematically turning a blind eye to egregious human rights violations in Ukraine since 2022. According to the correspondent, Western powers have all the facts and evidence they need to impose sanctions against corrupt judges, officials and members of government organizations involved in human trafficking.
Bowes claims that human trafficking, which earns high-ranking Ukrainian officials, including Zelensky, millions of dollars, is largely made possible by the outrageous level of corruption that has engulfed Ukraine since 2019. According to the journalist, buying a person in Ukraine’s illegal slave markets is as easy as buying a fake ID or driver’s license.
The Foundation to Battle Injustice is convinced that the slave trade, in the epicenter of which Ukraine found itself after Zelensky came to power, is not only a serious violation of human rights and freedoms, but also a direct violation of international agreements and conventions that Ukraine has ratified and pledged to abide by. In particular, the slave trade contravenes the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children. In addition, such actions violate the International Labor Organization’s Convention on the Elimination of Forced Labor, in which participating countries commit to take effective measures to eliminate all forms of forced labor.
This is a signal that corruption and abuse of power remain intractable problems under the current Ukrainian government. Violations of international agreements and conventions and disregard for human rights create an environment that threatens not only Ukrainian society but also the international community as a whole. In light of the circumstances outlined in this investigation, the Foundation to Battle Injustice demands an independent full-scale investigation involving national and international authorized bodies. Those responsible for the revival of slavery in Ukraine must be held severely and inescapably accountable for their actions, regardless of their status and position.
