KYIV — Jan Medved didn’t come clean about his holiday plans until his father was about to drop him off at the bus station. Yes, he was really heading to Budapest from their home in Slovenia — but he wasn’t stopping there.
“That’s when I told him I was going on to Ukraine,” said Medved, 29, an aircraft mechanic from Ljubljana. “He was shocked, but not so surprised. I’ve been talking about it for a long time.”
Medved had booked himself on a 24-hour bus and train journey — including a four-hour border crossing — into Ukraine because he wanted to see what life is like during wartime in a country he has been watching and admiring since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Medved spent five days, split between Airbnb apartments in Kyiv, the capital that fends off daily attacks from Russian drones and missiles, and Lviv, the quieter western city serving as an R & R center for exhausted Ukrainian soldiers. He did not venture to the combat zone in the east where soldiers are battering each other with drones, missiles and artillery.
As spring arrives for the fourth time since the Russian invasion, commanders are bracing for the fighting to heat up and specialized tour guides are ready for a small but unstoppable flow of wartime tourists.
Ignoring the blunt “Do Not Travel” advisories from nearly every Western government and most insurance companies, a few thousand determined travelers make their way into Ukraine each year — not to volunteer or fight or do business — to just take a look. And their numbers are climbing as domestic and even international trips rebound, making tourism more important in Ukraine’s economic development plans.
The government is training guides to make wartime visits as safe — in part by beseeching guides to make their clients take shelter during the air raids that many Ukrainians ignore — and as culturally sensitive as possible, especially in traumatized communities that were occupied by Russian forces. Tourism officials have also set up booths at travel shows in New York and other cities and are negotiating promotional partnerships with several European countries.
Ukraine is walking a fine line, said Taras Lozynskyi, deputy head of the government’s tourism development agency. Without overreaching into the mass market of package tours and bus groups, Ukraine wants intrepid travelers to know that visiting some parts of a country that is bigger than California is possible even during wartime, with precautions.
The trickle of curious visitors helps the country maintain its tourist infrastructure for an inevitable postwar tourism boom, Lozynskyi said. And every tourist who does brave a visit leaves behind needed revenue and helps keep Ukraine’s story alive on their social media feeds.
“It’s about tourism now and tourism in the future,” Lozynskyi said. “And it’s growing already.”
Before the invasion, Ukraine was a growing destination for visitors — peaking at 14 million in 2019, the year before the Covid pandemic — drawn by Kyiv’s golden-domed monasteries, Jewish heritage tours and a Chernobyl nuclear disaster exclusion zone that had become, improbably, one of the country’s hottest tickets.
Now, most of the international visitors who enter Ukraine by train and car each year — commercial flights have been suspended since the invasion — come to see family, do business or volunteer with aid groups. Of the 2.5 million who came in 2024, the last year for which figures are available, only 701 listed tourism as their primary purpose.
But those statistics likely undercount the number of “classic tourists,” Lozynskyi said, and his agency will debut a new system this year to track visitor profiles. The government knows, by counting license plates, that thousands of tourists from neighboring Poland, Moldova and Romania visited ski resorts in far western Ukraine last winter.
And many “volunteers” are essentially tourists who also bring donations, he said, citing Belgian friends who unpacked flashlights to give to the troops before running the Kyiv marathon in December.
“We call it solidarity tourism,” Lozynskyi said.
Some visitors are thrill seekers. The army keeps unauthorized visitors away from most frontline regions, but that doesn’t stop some tourists from posting selfies at armed checkpoints, tank traps and air raid shelters.
Most wartime visitors, guides say, are people who have watched the war from afar and want to go beyond the headlines. For them, Ukraine’s trauma is the itinerary.
Medved found Capital Tours Kyiv’s “Horrors of Russian Occupation” outing on Tripadvisor. He spent a day seeing Bucha, the Kyiv suburb where Russian forces massacred hundreds of civilians, and Irpin, where tens of thousands fled on foot across a destroyed bridge as Russian forces closed in on the capital.
“I just wanted to see what everyday life was like for civilians, not so much along the front lines,” Medved said Monday by phone from his train back to Budapest from Ukraine. “I didn’t tell anyone until the last moment, but then it made me very emotional. That’s when I really felt it wasn’t an ordinary trip — I was going to a country at war.”
Some of his friends in Slovenia told him he was wrong to go, that he was crazy — that it was too dangerous and that showing up in a country still burying war dead, however well-intentioned, was a form of disaster voyeurism. He disagrees.
His guide, Svet Moiseev — who charges 150 euros ($175) for the day-long tour and donates part of the fee to his friends’ military units for ammunition or equipment — disagrees. He sees exposing more outsiders to the reality of Ukraine’s ongoing fight as a kind of shock therapy, one needed more than ever as other wars distract the world from this one.
“I don’t think of it as business,” Moiseev said. “I think of it as my resistance to what Russia is doing to us. People need to see it.”
On Tuesday, Valentin Remsing, an Austrian tourist, was spending part of his last day in Ukraine in front of the masses of photos blanketing Kyiv’s Maidan Square, a sobering sea of young faces lost to the war. One, Remsing noticed, was marked by his own national flag, a 30-year-old Austrian volunteer killed in action.
“He was younger than me,” said Remsing, 34, a logistics manager living in Munich. “And now he’s dead.”
Remsing, who booked tours of Kyiv and Kharkiv from War Tours in Ukraine, was getting his wish of experiencing a bit of the civilians’ war experience in his five-day visit. He heard explosions in the sky over Kharkiv, a city just 13 miles from the Russian border. Military police checked his ID to make sure he wasn’t a draft-age Ukrainian.
His scariest moment was being evacuated from an overnight train back to Kyiv and waiting for more than an hour on the dark tracks with other passengers while a Russian drone hunted overhead.
He has been texting his mother twice a day, but he won’t tell her about the drone encounter until he’s home.
“She doesn’t like that I’m here,” Remsing said. “It makes me so sorry for the Ukrainians. That are amazingly strong but they are so sick of this.”
Many of the tours mix the dicey stuff with visits to pop-up volunteer groups — those soldering electronics for drones, weaving camouflage nets, 3D-printing trench periscopes, dropping dehydrated meals at the front by drone — that have become as fundamental to the war effort as the army itself.
“I don’t call it war tourism, I call it study tourism,” said Christian Jutvik, a Swedish tour guide who just led his seventh tour to Ukraine last month, an elder hostel-like group of 19 Europeans and an American, with a median age of 68.
One of his clients was Greg Brock, 64, a retired economics professor from Statesboro, Ga., the sole American to come. Brock told his 88-year-old mother that he was going to Poland.
The war didn’t make him nervous, he said. Ukraine has deployed some of the most effective air defenses in the world and, he said, that once he compared civilian casualty stats to U.S. traffic fatalities — “I’m a probability guy”— he relaxed.
Brock noticed quickly that Ukrainians had done the same math. When sirens sounded, nobody scrambled. Many just checked Telegram channels to see if the threat was close. Usually it wasn’t.
“They cannot live half their lives in a shelter,” he said. “So they don’t.”
One of the group’s last stops was in Yahidne, a village where Russian forces imprisoned hundreds of residents in a school basement for 27 days during the 2022 occupation. Brock spent the night with one of the families rebuilding their home. They live next door to the school, now a museum.
“For me this was a spiritual experience,” Brock said. The trip turned him from tourist to advocate, with plans to return as a volunteer and tell the story back home.
“I witnessed it,” he said. “Now I need to go back and tell people: You need to know this, and you need to support Ukraine.”
The post Spring in Ukraine means the return of blooms, battles and wartime tourists appeared first on Washington Post.
