Every few weeks, Svitlana Dvornikova leaves her home near the front line in Ukraine and travels to a luxurious rented villa on the Mediterranean coast of France or Spain.
She puts on makeup, a wig and high heels, and adopts a pseudonym.
Dvornikova is not there to escape war. He travels abroad to broadcast solo shows to his million subscribers on the online adult platform OnlyFans. Doing so in Ukraine could land her in jail.
Unlike most European countries, the production, distribution and possession of pornography in Ukraine is illegal and punishable by up to seven years in prison. Still, Ukraine has failed to curb a vast and lucrative porn industry that authorities say operates under the protection of corrupt police.
Ukrainian authorities now require that people working in the porn industry pay taxes. But anyone who complies with this obligation is, in practice, confirming their participation in criminal activity.
"These women either do not pay taxes and face criminal charges for it, or they pay taxes and are accused of violating pornography laws," said Yaroslav Zhelezniak, an opposition lawmaker who chairs the finance committee of the Ukrainian parliament. "It is a tragicomic situation."
Zhelezniak is now leading an initiative to legalize porn in Ukraine, arguing that doing so would not only help combat corruption but would generate up to $25 million a year in tax revenue.
It may be a drop in the ocean for a country waging a war for survival and claiming to need $120 billion a year for its defense needs. But the sum that Zhelezniak foresees would be enough to pay for 30,000 drones.
A bill of which Zhelezniak is a co-author is awaiting its second reading in Parliament after passing a first vote in July.
Meanwhile, Dvornikova is one of thousands of women who skirt the law by working abroad or leaving Ukraine entirely to pursue porn; many of them thus contribute to increasing the tax revenues of other countries.
“This is a victimless crime,” said Lesia Mykhalenko, a tax attorney who has represented more than 100 OnlyFans models. "It places an unnecessary burden on the judicial system at a time when we should be focusing on defending the country."
For years, Ukrainian authorities turned a blind eye to this underground industry. Many of Ukraine's largest porn studios made huge profits in collusion with corrupt law enforcement officials. In a recent example, Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office stated in May that police departments in three different regions had each been receiving more than $20,000 a month in bribes.
Things changed after the Russian invasion. Two years after the start of the war, Ukrainian tax authorities received data on thousands of Ukrainians from OnlyFans' UK-based parent company, Fenix International.
The figures revealed that 7,900 Ukrainians earned more than $131 million through OnlyFans during 2023. That meant millions of dollars were owed in taxes.
OnlyFans models across Ukraine began receiving letters from authorities. Some earned more than $20,000 a month. Many, including Dvornikova, filed their tax returns. Unbeknownst to them, this meant that they could now be accused not only of tax evasion, but also of illicitly producing pornography.
Dvornikova and her husband were getting their daughter ready for school one morning last spring when police arrived to search their home and accused her of breaking the law by producing pornography for profit. They seized a laptop, USB drives and the equivalent of $200,000 in cash, which she said she had set aside to pay taxes.
"They had a list of webcam models and knew all their addresses," Dvornikova said in an interview. According to her, the agents told her that she could give them half of the cash as a bribe and keep the rest. She rejected the offer.
Similar searches were carried out throughout the country. A woman in her twenties told the WSJ that after police searched her apartment and charged her earlier this year, she hid elsewhere in Ukraine. She said that the police summoned her to a court hearing, but she decided not to attend because she feared that the authorities would want to take advantage of the meeting to demand a bribe.
Hundreds of OnlyFans models have gone to live abroad. One of them, who now lives in Georgia, stated that this small Caucasus country has a large community of Ukrainian OnlyFans models who earn thousands of dollars a month and frequent luxurious nightclubs in its capital, Tbilisi.
Those who have remained in Ukraine have resorted to alternative solutions.
Former waitress Iryna Mosiychuk runs a company called Beezone, which bills itself as a business consultancy. “We create opportunities for those who aspire for more,” says its website, full of motivational slogans and revealing nothing about what Beezone really does.
Its main office, located in an anonymous two-story building on the outskirts of Lviv in western Ukraine, is actually a set of webcam studios, used by several dozen models who perform for clients, mostly from the United States, to the sound of loud pop music.
The women consult a smartphone app to stay up to date with Russian airstrike alerts. Sometimes they have to interrupt the live broadcasts and run to the bomb shelter.
"Missiles are bad for business," Mosiychuk laments.
Mosiychuk says his models earn between $2,000 and $7,000 a month. She helps them pay their taxes. In exchange, they sign contracts agreeing not to undress on camera, although Mosiychuk says he can't control all of them. When police visited Beezone last year, Mosiychuk said they found no evidence to charge her.
Mosiychuk has written to Ukrainian lawmakers and government ministries arguing that the $5,000 he pays in taxes each month could increase twenty-fold if he were allowed to expand the business and stop trying to control what his girls do behind closed doors.
"I don't want my country to ask other countries for help and weapons," he said. "If our sector could grow, I think we could help Ukraine manage all this on its own."
Dvornikova has made the same argument. In June 2025, after the police raid, he submitted a petition that was published on the website of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
She described herself as a “conscientious taxpayer” and said that, instead of calling her a criminal, the government should be grateful for the 40,000,000 hryvnias – about $900,000 – she had paid in taxes, a sum she said was equivalent to 100 new pickup trucks for the army, 2,000 drones or “hundreds of Russians killed on the front.”
In less than a week, Dvornikova's petition had gathered the more than 25,000 signatures needed to get a response from Zelensky, who stated that parliament would study legislation to legalize pornography.
Dvornikova's case has not gone to court. According to her, she has been informed that it has been suspended while Parliament studies the new law. The confiscated money has been returned to him.
For now, he continues to move between two worlds: he runs his home in Ukraine and earns a living abroad through the Internet. His OnlyFans account cannot be viewed in Ukraine, which means that only his closest friends know about his alter ego.
Regarding his online presence, he said: "You know who I am in Ukraine, but you have no idea who I am there."
