Vitalii Syniakov once ran tours to Kyiv's golden-domed churches and the beaches of Odesa. But after the first Russian missiles hit Kyiv in February 2022, “tourism died for about a year,” he says.Now the industry veteran is one of several operators offering what he calls "dark tours" to sites made notorious by the Russian invasion.“Frankly, now about 80 percent of all the tours we provide are dark tours,” he tells RFE/RL.
Tourists at the war-damaged House of Culture in Irpin
Even before Russia's full-scale invasion, tourism in Ukraine had been buffeted by consecutive crises.In 2013, over 24 million tourists visited Ukraine -- nearly half of them Russians. “There was a real boom,” Syniakov says of the early 2010s. But numbers plummeted in 2014 as the Kremlin's annexation of Crimea and conflict in the Donbas region opened a rift between the neighboring countries.Then came the COVID pandemic, stifling virtually all international travel.But shortly before February 2022, "there was another boom and we had many tourists from the [United] Arab Emirates and from India,” Syniakov says. “Frankly, they were looking for beautiful Ukrainian girls.”Then the Kremlin launched its invasion. The reported 2.1 million visitors that arrived in Ukraine throughout 2022 marked a more than 90 percent drop in tourist numbers from pre-2014 highs.Several travelers who did arrive to Ukraine booked tours of war sites that were already being advertised in the summer of 2022.
