War Tours, 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.
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.
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.
“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”.
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