Every few months, an article runs in a major newspaper under some variation of the headline: “Tourists Flock to Ukraine’s War Zones.” The subtext is usually discomfort — the implication that visiting a place of ongoing conflict is ghoulish, voyeuristic, morally questionable.
I am a Kyiv tour guide. I have been organising tours since before the full-scale invasion, and I have watched the nature of who comes to Kyiv change profoundly since February 2022. I want to say something direct about what I have actually observed.
Who actually comes
“War tourist” conjures an image of an adrenaline-seeking thrill-monger flying into a combat zone for kicks. That is not what I see.
The people who book tours with me are — in rough order of frequency:
Journalists and researchers who want to understand context beyond what their editors assign them to cover. They come on their own time, paying out of their own pockets.
Activists and advocates who are going to go home and write, speak, campaign, donate. They want primary experience to ground their advocacy.
Ordinary people — teachers, engineers, nurses, retirees — who have been watching the news for four years and feel that watching is insufficient. Many of them have already donated to Ukraine in various ways. They want to see.
Ukrainians from the diaspora visiting for the first time since the invasion, or returning for the first time since emigrating decades ago.
Business travellers extending a work trip because they want to understand the place where they’re doing business.
In four years of guiding since the full-scale invasion, I can count on one hand the number of visitors who seemed to be there for the thrill. The overwhelming majority come with the kind of serious, reflective attention that the subject demands.
Where the phrase came from
“Dark tourism” is not a slur that newspapers invented. It is an academic term, coined by two Scottish researchers in the mid-1990s, for travel to sites associated with death and disaster. Auschwitz. The Killing Fields. Pompeii. Ground Zero. It was meant to describe a real and long-standing phenomenon without either celebrating or condemning it.
The trouble is what happens when the label is lifted out of the literature and dropped onto Ukraine, because every one of those canonical examples shares something this place does not: the event is over. The visitor arrives after history has closed, to a site that has been curated, interpreted and turned into a place of memory, usually decades later, usually by people who were not there.
Kyiv is not that. The war is running. The people you meet are not custodians of a memory; they are living inside the thing itself, and they will still be living inside it after you fly home. That is a different relationship, with different obligations, and calling it by the name of the other one smuggles in the wrong set of assumptions.
The test that actually separates the two
I would rather be judged against something concrete than against a label, so here is the standard I think applies. Four questions, and they are not rhetorical.
Does the place want visitors? Bucha and Irpin do, explicitly and repeatedly, and have said so through their own officials and residents. A community that asks to be seen is in a different position from one being looked at.
Does the money reach the people who live there? Not “does it go to a good cause” in the abstract, but does it land in the town: the café, the shop, the driver, the local economy that has to rebuild. If the answer is no, the visit is extraction.
Does anything leave with you besides an experience? Understanding you can argue from. An account you will repeat. A donation you would not otherwise have made. A vote cast with more information behind it. If a visit produces nothing except the fact of having been, it was for you alone.
Who is doing the narrating? There is a difference between a resident explaining their own street and an outsider performing someone else’s catastrophe for an audience.
What would make it voyeurism
For the sake of honesty, the other half of the list. These are the things I do not do, and the requests I turn down.
- Anyone who wants to get closer to the fighting for the sake of being closer to the fighting. The front is not a viewing platform and the people there are working.
- Photographs of residents, graves or mourners taken without asking. A memorial is not a backdrop.
- Treating a damaged building as a set for personal photographs. It is somebody’s home, and frequently still occupied.
- Framing a visit as courage. Kyiv is a functioning city. Coming here is not brave, and describing it that way insults everybody who has no choice about being here.
The line is not the subject matter. It is the posture.
The economic argument
Here is something the “dark tourism” framing entirely ignores: visiting Ukraine right now is an act of economic solidarity.
When international tourism collapsed after February 2022, it devastated an already-stressed Ukrainian economy. Hotels, restaurants, guides, drivers — entire livelihoods dependent on visitors who stopped coming. Every foreign tourist who stays in a Kyiv hotel, eats in a Kyiv restaurant, and hires a Kyiv guide is contributing directly to the economic resilience of people who are simultaneously helping fund a war effort.
I am transparent about this: up to 50% of what I earn from tours goes directly to support Ukraine’s defense capability. My guests know this. Many come specifically because they want to contribute in a way that is more grounded than wiring money to a charity they don’t know.
The witnessing argument
There is a long tradition of bearing witness to atrocity as a moral act — journalists in Cambodia, novelists at Auschwitz, diplomats visiting Srebrenica. We do not call this dark tourism. We call it the responsibility of documentation.
Bucha, Hostomel, Irpin are not historical abstractions. They happened four years ago. Physical evidence of what occurred there remains. Residents who experienced the occupation are still present and willing to speak. The opportunity to document, to understand, to carry these accounts back to your country and your community — that window does not stay open forever.
When it closes, what remains is photographs and statistics. While both matter, neither is the same as standing on Yablunska Street and talking to someone who was there.
My position
I am not neutral about this war. I am a Ukrainian. I was in Kyiv when the invasion began. I have watched friends lose family members, watched the city I love become a target, watched the country I live in fight for its existence.
I guide tours because I believe that what is happening here needs to be witnessed by as many people from as many countries as possible. Not out of despair — out of the conviction that understanding creates solidarity, and solidarity matters.
If coming to Kyiv and seeing this with your own eyes is dark tourism, then I am proud to be running dark tours.