Why Ukraine wants to legalise pornography and how it could fund the war - The Indian Express
Ukraine, which is in the middle of a war with Russia, has a new fix for its ailing coffers as the conflict lingers for over four years — legalising pornography.
The plan may seem to be a hyperbole, but the data shows otherwise. The legalization of porn is expected to generate around $25 million in tax revenue, enough for purchasing 30,000 drones for the war effort, a report in The Washington Post said.
According to the Post, Ukraine’s porn industry is believed to have generated $131 million for 8,000 OnlyFans creators in the country in 2023. Meanwhile, the daily cost of the war for Kyiv was $190 million this year, according to Reuters.
Ukraine’s porn industry has run for years without any legal status, out of sight of the law. Police mostly left it alone, while some officers used the grey area to demand bribes from people working in it.
Now, with the country short of money for the war and facing a budget gap of $27 billion, lawmakers are moving to make pornography legal, a step that would change how the country is seen after years of being linked to the exploitation of women in the sex trade, the report said.
The push for legal status began after tax officials started chasing adult-content creators for unpaid tax. This put creators in a difficult spot: paying tax meant admitting they were breaking the law by making pornographic content in the first place, according to the report.
One of the people leading the push is Yaroslav Zhelezniak, who chairs the finance committee in Ukraine’s parliament. He argues that legal pornography would bring in around $25 million a year in tax, enough, he says, to pay for 30,000 drones for the war effort, the report said.
Svitlana Dvornikova, an OnlyFans creator with a large following, was among those contacted by tax authorities. She has said the tax she has already paid could cover 100 military pickup trucks or 2,000 drones on its own. After her run-in with the police, she started a petition calling for pornography to be made legal. The petition has now collected more than 25,000 signatures, the report said.
Oksana, who heads management at OFM Models, an agency that represents adult-content creators in Ukraine and abroad, told The Washington Post that enquiries from women wanting to join the industry had doubled since the bill’s first reading in parliament.
Officials have struggled to enforce the existing ban. In just the first six months of 2025, more than 2,300 criminal cases linked to pornography were opened in Ukraine, the report said. The bill now awaits a second reading in parliament after clearing its first vote.
$25 million is a small figure next to the roughly $120 billion Ukraine says it needs each year for defence. But lawmakers argue that even a modest, steady source of income is worth pursuing, especially one that is already there, simply operating outside the law.
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