4 July 2025, 09:47

By Megan Gittoes

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, millions were displaced overnight triggering Europe’s worst refugee crisis since WWII - of which 90% were women and children.

The West responded swiftly with humanitarian aid, but largely overlooked one of the most immediate and foreseeable threats: human and sexual trafficking.

Following the outbreak of conflict in Ukraine in 2014, the number of Ukrainian trafficking victims identified in Western Europe quadrupled by 2016. Since 2022, a similar spike has been observed within Ukraine’s borders - but not across them. This is striking, particularly as trafficking across Europe hit a ten-year high that year.

Such data gaps are not uncommon. Human trafficking is notoriously difficult to detect, with victims often going unidentified.

Many belong to so-called ‘hidden populations’ - refugees, undocumented migrants, and those coerced into sex work or crime - people who lack legal protections and remain isolated by fear and coercion, leaving them largely invisible to law enforcement.

One official international report dismissed concerns by claiming conditions at the border did not align with traffickers’ typical methods.

It even suggested that media warnings at the time were harming, rather than helping, refugees. Yet those working on the ground - many of whom had directly intervened to prevent exploitation - described a stark absence of meaningful engagement from those very same international organisations.

While in Ukraine, officials and NGOs shared with me anecdotal accounts of refugees falling into exploitation - and in some cases,........

© LBC