Ukraine Considers Legalizing Porn Industry to Fund Its War Chest

I urge you to support these freedom fighters who only want to contribute financially to the war effort. If you find yourself addicted to porn, please consider consuming Ukrainian porn. A public service announcement from the Report.

Ukraine Considers Legalizing Porn Industry to Fund Its War Chest

Lawmakers say taxing the country’s thousands of OnlyFans models could collect $25 million a year

By Matthew Luxmoore, WSJ

Sept. 5, 2026

Ukraine is considering legalizing its porn industry to raise tax revenues and help fund its defense needs.

KYIV, Ukraine—Every few weeks, Svitlana Dvornikova leaves her home near the front line in Ukraine and travels to a rented luxury villa on the Mediterranean coast of France or Spain.

She dons makeup, a wig, high heels and a pseudonym.

Dvornikova isn’t there to escape the war. She travels abroad to stream solo shows to her one million subscribers on the adult online platform OnlyFans. Doing it in Ukraine could land her in jail.

Unlike in most European countries, the production, distribution and possession of pornography in Ukraine is illegal, punishable by up to seven years in prison. Still, Ukraine has been unable to curtail a vast and lucrative porn industry, which officials say operates with the protection of corrupt police.

Ukrainian authorities are now demanding taxes from people who work in the porn industry. But anyone who complies is effectively confirming their involvement in criminal activity.

“These women either don’t pay taxes and face criminal charges for that, or they pay taxes and get charged with violating pornography laws,” said Yaroslav Zhelezniak, an opposition lawmaker who chairs the finance committee in Ukraine’s Parliament. “It’s a tragicomic situation.”

Zhelezniak is now leading a push to legalize porn in Ukraine, arguing that doing so wouldn’t only help against corruption, but would raise up to $25 million a year in tax revenues.

It might be a drop in the ocean for a country fighting a war of survival that says it needs $120 billion a year for its defense needs. But the sum that Zhelezniak predicts would be enough to pay for 30,000 drones.

A bill co-authored by Zhelezniak is awaiting its second reading in Parliament after winning a first vote in July.

Meanwhile, Dvornikova is one of thousands of women who skirt the law by operating abroad or moving out of Ukraine altogether to make porn—many of them boosting the tax revenues of other countries instead.

“This is a victimless crime,” said Lesia Mykhalenko, a tax lawyer who has represented more than 100 OnlyFans models. “It unnecessarily burdens the legal system at a time when we should be focused on defending the country.”

Lesia Mykhalenko, a tax lawyer who has represented OnlyFans models in Ukraine.

For years, Ukrainian authorities turned a blind eye to the shadowy industry. Many of Ukraine’s largest porn studios made handsome profits in cahoots with corrupt law-enforcement agents. In one recent example, the office of Ukraine’s general prosecutor said in May that police departments in three separate regions had each been receiving over $20,000 a month in bribes.

Things changed after Russia invaded. Two years into the war, Ukraine’s tax authorities received data on thousands of Ukrainians from OnlyFans’ U.K.-based parent company, Fenix International.

The figures showed that 7,900 Ukrainians made in excess of $131 million from OnlyFans during 2023. That meant millions of dollars in taxes were owed.

OnlyFans models across Ukraine began receiving letters from the authorities. Some were making in excess of $20,000 a month. Many, including Dvornikova, filed tax declarations. Unbeknown to them, this meant they could now be charged not only with tax evasion but with illicitly producing porn.

Dvornikova and her husband were getting their daughter ready for school one morning last spring when police arrived to search her home and accused her of breaking the law by producing pornography for profit. They seized a laptop, flash drives and the equivalent of $200,000 in cash, which she said she had set aside for taxes.

“They had a list of webcam models, and knew all their addresses,” Dvornikova said in an interview. She said the officers told her she could give them half of the cash as a bribe and keep the rest. She declined the offer.

Similar searches were conducted across the country. One woman in her early 20s told the Journal that after police searched her apartment and charged her earlier this year, she went into hiding in another part of Ukraine. She said she was summoned to a court hearing by police, but decided not to go because she feared officials wanted to use the meeting to extract a bribe.

Hundreds of OnlyFans models have left to live abroad. One, who now lives in Georgia, said the small Caucasus country has a large community of Ukrainian OnlyFans models who make thousands of dollars each month and frequent swanky night clubs in its capital city, Tbilisi.

Those who have stayed inside Ukraine have resorted to workarounds.

Former waitress Iryna Mosiychuk runs a company called Beezone, which advertises itself as a business consulting firm. “We create opportunities for those who strive for more,” says its website, which is full of motivational slogans and reveals nothing about what Beezone actually does.

Beezone offices. Three women working in an office, two on phones and one on a computer.

Beezone is a collection of webcam studios used by several dozen models.

Its main office, inside a nondescript two-story building on the outskirts of Lviv in western Ukraine, is actually a collection of webcam studios, used by several dozen models who perform for mostly U.S.-based clients to the soundtrack of booming pop music.

The women monitor a smartphone app to track alerts for Russian airstrikes. Sometimes they have to interrupt livestreams and rush to the bomb shelter.

“Missiles are bad for business,” Mosiychuk laments.

Mosiychuk said her models earn between $2,000 and $7,000 a month. She helps pay their taxes. In return they sign contracts in which they promise not to take their clothes off on camera, although Mosiychuk said she can’t control them all. 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 she pays in taxes each month could increase twentyfold if she were allowed to expand the business and stop trying to control what her women do behind closed doors.

“I don’t want my country to ask other countries for support and weapons,” she said. “If our industry was able to grow, I think we could help Ukraine manage all this on its own.”

Beezone's owner, Iryna Mosiychuk, in black, says she helps pay her models' taxes.

Dvornikova has been making the same case. In June 2025, after the police raid, she submitted a petition that was published on the website of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Describing herself as a “conscientious taxpayer,” she said that instead of branding her a criminal, the government should be thankful for the 40,000,000 hryvnias, about $900,000, she had paid in taxes—a sum she said was worth 100 new pickup trucks for the army, 2,000 drones or “hundreds of Russians killed on the front line.”

Within a week, Dvornikova’s petition had gathered the more than 25,000 signatures needed to trigger a response from Zelensky, who said Parliament would consider the legislation to legalize porn.

Dvornikova’s case hasn’t come to court. She said she was told it has been put on hold while Parliament considers the new law. Her confiscated cash has been returned.

For now, she continues to straddle two worlds, running a household in Ukraine and earning her online living abroad. Her OnlyFans account can’t be viewed in Ukraine, meaning only her closest friends know her alter ego.

Of her online presence, she said: “You know who I am in Ukraine, but you have no idea who I am there.”