When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the world watched tanks roll across borders, missiles strike cities and millions of refugees pour into Europe. Less visible, but no less devastating, is another war unfolding in the shadows: the kidnapping, trafficking and illegal displacement of civilians. In occupied territories, Russian security forces abduct teachers, journalist and ordinary residents. Along refugee routes, traffickers prey on women and children fleeing the bombings. And in the gaps left by state institutions stretched to breaking point, Ukrainian women step in.

“Displacement makes people vulnerable”, says Kateryna Borozdina, who coordinates Ukraine’s national hotlines at La Strada-Ukraine . “People are fleeing bombs, leaving everything behind, and traffickers exploit that uncertainty every single day”.

Borozdina’s team operates two hotlines: one for domestic violence, trafficking and gender discrimination, and another for children and youth. In 2023 alone, they handled 45,000 calls. “About three percent involve trafficking”, explains Borozdina, “but that number is not small. It represents real people in danger, and the trend is rising”.

Her staff now experiments with unconventional tools: an online course on Prometheus and an interactive quest game that allows young women to navigate simulated trafficking risks.

“Traffickers know how to manipulate urgency. They tell you, ‘Don’t lose this chance, only you have it’”, says Borozdina. “We need to teach people to recognize those tricks before it is too late”

Kidnapped into silence

Leniye Umerova claims that the danger does not come from shadowy traffickers but from the Russian state itself. A Crimean Tatar activist in her twenties, she attempted in late 2022 to reach her gravely ill father in Crimea. The peninsula, her birthplace, has been under Russian occupation since 2014, when Moscow staged an illegal referendum after seizing the territory with troops.

Since then, Crimean Tatars – the Indigenous people of the region and among the most outspoken critics of the annexation – face systematic repression: raids, arrests, enforced disappearances. There are at least 205 Crimean political prisoners currently in detention, and 134 of them are Crimean Tatars.

For Umerova, returning to support her family means entering a place where her very identity makes her suspect. With direct routes from mainland Ukraine to Crimea blocked by the war, she was forced to take a weeklong detour through Georgia and into Russia, exposing herself to the scrutiny of Russian border guards.

At the checkpoint, officials examined her Ukrainian passport. It listed her birthplace: Crimea. “They asked me for a Russian passport which I did not have, recalls Umerova. Within hours, men in civilian clothes dragged her off a bus. “From that moment on, I disappeared”.

She was shuttled through detention centers in North Ossetia, denied a lawyer and subjected to fabricated charges. At first, she was told she had violated migration rules. Months later, Russians accused her of espionage. In Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, she encountered other Ukrainian women kidnapped from occupied regions.

“One woman, a volunteer from occupied parts of Zaporizhya region, had her jaw broken during interrogation”, says Umerova. “They forced her to confess on camera. To hide the injury, they put a mask on her face”.

Another detainee, a teacher from Kherson, was arrested for organising an underground school. Others were mothers separated from their children, journalists punished for reporting and activists branded “terrorists” working in occupied parts of Southern and Eastern Ukraine.

“We all share one thing: invisibility”, says Umerova. “We are civilians, not soldiers. But our lives are treated as disposable”.

She spent more than a year in Lefortovo, enduring sleep deprivation and psychological pressure. In 2024, she was released in a prisoner exchange. Today, she campaigns for civilian hostages still trapped in Russian prisons.

“Prisoners of war are visible. Civilians are not. But these are Ukrainian citizens. They sit in prison only because they refuse to betray their dignity”.

Healing the stigma

Even for those who return, freedom does not mean peace. Survivors of captivity or trafficking face stigma, unemployment and lasting psychological scars.

“Many survivors come back not just with trauma but also with suspicion from their communities”, explains Nina Pakhomiuk, head of Volyn Prospects , a human rights and feminist collective in Western Ukraine that supports women returning from Russian prisons and trafficking networks.

“Neighbors whisper that if a woman was in Russian captivity or was trafficked, she must have collaborated or been broken”, says Pakhomiuk. “Our work is to help them rebuild dignity, find jobs, reconnect with their children, and to remind them they have a future”.

Her organization offers safe spaces, therapy and vocational training. It runs peer-support circles where women mentor each other through bureaucracy and trauma. “Survivors cannot heal alone”, explains Pakhomiuk. “What we do is build communities of trust, so women do not disappear twice – first in captivity, then in silence”.

The trafficking crisis is not confined to Russia’s prisons. Across Ukraine and its borders, displaced women fall prey to exploitation. Some are lured with promises of housing or work, only to end up in forced labor or coerced marriages. Others remain in Ukraine but accept abusive arrangements simply to survive.

“In some cases, women tell us they would rather stay in exploitation than go back to a destroyed home”, says Borozdina. “That is not a choice. That is desperation.”

Her hotline receives calls from women tricked into working on farms under abusive conditions in western Ukraine, or offered “free housing” by men demanding sex in return. Many cases begin online. “Traffickers push people off safe platforms into encrypted apps like Telegram and WhatsApp”, explains Borozdina. “They want to break the trail, to make them harder to trace”.

The war’s economic collapse only sharpens these risks. Families who have lost everything accept jobs without contracts. “The war – concludes Borozdina – has made every financial decision a life-or-death matter”.

Building systems from the ground up

International monitoring groups estimate that trafficking cases in conflict-affected parts of Ukraine have risen by nearly 40 percent since 2022. At the same time, Russia has deported tens of thousands of civilians from occupied areas, many of whom remain unaccounted for.

Into this vacuum step women like Umerova, Borozdina and Pakhomiuk. Their initiatives span prevention, rescue and reintegration: tracing the disappeared, documenting abuses, lobbying for exchanges, training survivors and helping them rebuild lives.

The infrastructure is fragile and underfunded, yet resilient. “Each phone call, each prevented case, each woman who does not vanish into silence – these moments add up”, says Borozdina.

Umerova considers her work deeply personal. She still receives letters from women she met in Lefortovo. “They write: we are glad you were freed. It gives us hope”, says the activist. “That is why I tell my story. If people see a face, they react. If they react, governments react”.

The women leading these efforts reject the idea that trafficking, deportation and illegal detention are collateral damage of war. They insist these are central fronts of the conflict.

“This war is not only fought with bombs”, says Umerova. “It is also fought in prisons, in shelters, in the way we defend each other’s dignity”.

By building networks of support, exposing crimes and helping survivors reintegrate, Ukrainian women are not only protecting the vulnerable – they are laying the foundations for recovery and peace.

“Survivors are not statistics”, concludes Umerova. “They are human beings. And when you protect them, you protect society itself”.