More Ukrainians suffer from human traffickers, endure slave labor as part of exodus abroad

Oleksandr Pranko was wounded during the EuroMaidan Revolution that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 and was beaten by Kremlin-backed militia in Donetsk the very same year.

But his worst ordeal happened in 2016, when he spent almost six months in Russia as a slave laborer.

He worked initially at a brick factory in the suburbs of Makhachkala in Dagestan in Russia’s Caucasus region, and later was forced to work at cattle farms, first in Dagestan and then in Kalmykiya in southern Russia.

“Human trafficking is flourishing there,” Pranko, now 31, told the Kyiv Post. It was his luck, persistence, and the help of his friends that brought him back home. Now he is trying to build his life from scratch.
Russia’s war against Ukraine — in its fifth year with more than 10,300 people killed — has hit the economy hard, prompting thousands of Ukrainians to look for jobs abroad.

But some end up trapped in other countries as slave labor conditions.

Change of trends

In 2017, the number of reported human trafficking cases from Ukraine was 1,259, the highest level since the International Organization of Migration (IOM) started its count in 2000. As of the end of March, the IOM had recorded 270 cases of human trafficking this year.

Altogether, over 230,000 Ukrainians have been victims of human trafficking since 1991, according to the research.

In contrast to common belief, 90 percent of the human trafficking cases in 2017 were for forced
labor and not sexual exploitation, according to the report. And in more than 60 percent of the cases the victims were men.

Many men, who still think that human trafficking is mostly a problem for females, “are much less aware of the risks related to labor trafficking,” said Thomas Lothar Weiss, the chief of mission at the IOM in Ukraine.

He added that most often men become victims of labor trafficking when they work in construction, agriculture or manufacturing.

‘Black business’

In 2015, Pranko was desperately looking for a job as a carpenter. Along with dozens of men, he was recruited by a firm in Kharkiv to construct military fortifications near the frontline town of Shchastia in Luhansk Oblast. But he says the firm deceived the workers, refusing to pay them the salary they had agreed to before.

Pranko remembers he was depressed and decided to try his luck in Russia.

He traveled to Moscow, finding work in a vegetable warehouse and then in so-called “working houses” — shelters for the homeless where people work in exchange for food, an opportunity to bathe and a place to sleep.

People were often beaten up and abused there, but the police turned a blind eye to these working houses, Pranko said. “It’s a black business.”

Getting worse

His life got even worse when someone stole his carpenter’s toolkit. So when a man at a train station offered him a job at a brick factory near Makhachkala, Pranko agreed.

“He told me: ‘I’ll pay for your bus ticket, and the driver will pay for your food’,” Pranko recalled.

But at the brick factory, he saw several dozen men like him, including one Ukrainian. “They didn’t pay us, but they gave us food, alcohol, and cigarettes,” he said.

According to what he heard, recruiters were receiving some 15,000 Russian rubles (about $240) for every person who worked at the factory for at least two weeks.

Pranko said his passport was taken away. He had neither money nor knowledge of where to go. When he eventually did attempt to escape, he was detained by local police officers who, instead of freeing him, resold him into forced labor at a cattle farm in the mountains of north Dagestan.

Pranko made several other attempts to escape, but was captured every time either by his owners or by the police, who returned him to slave work. Later he traveled as a hitchhiker through the Russian republic of Kalmykiya, where he was also forced to work either by local farmers or by the police.

Pranko returned to Ukraine in June 2016, with failing health and psychological problems. Since then, he has worked at various construction sites abroad and in Kyiv.

Low awareness

Despite the war, Russia remains the main destination for human trafficking from Ukraine in 2017. The IOM says that 65 percent of all cases involve Russia, followed by Poland, and Turkey, where many people are still exploited for sexual purposes, Weiss said.

Pranko’s story reflects the anonymous stories of other victims of human trafficking collected by the IOM.

They include the accounts of a 19-year-old student forced to work for free constructing a kindergarten in Moscow; a 37-year-old man who was forced to work at a construction site in Berlin; a 25-year-old hairdresser who was forced by her alleged boyfriend into sex trafficking in
Israel; and a five-year-old girl who was forced to beg for money by her stepfather.

Most of the victims were released by the traffickers after several months of work. But they returned home with serious health issues and problems in readapting to freedom.

Weiss said the eldest person who had approached the IOM for help was an 80-year-old woman who was forced to panhandle for her traffickers. The youngest victim was just three.

A survey conducted by GFK Ukraine in 2017 by the request of the IOM, shows that 17 percent of respondents were ready to take a job without officially being employed, 6 percent were ready to work in locked rooms where they are not allowed to leave their working sites without permission, 3 percent were ready to work at illegal enterprises, 2 percent were ready to illegally cross the border and 1 percent would agree to hand over their passports to employers.

Weiss said this shows that despite all the information campaigns, many Ukrainians are willing to take murky jobs without understanding that they risk ending up in the hands of traffickers.

Around 25 million people worldwide were involved in forced labor in 2016, according to the International Labor Organization. This is the third most lucrative illegal business, worth dozens of billions of dollars, following only drugs and arms trafficking.

“Trafficking can happen to anyone — young and old, male or female, and Ukrainians as much as foreigners,” Weiss said.