By Walter Finch For Mailonline. A Swedish police operation that swept up 38 men visiting prostitutes found that 30 of them had paid to sleep with exploited Ukrainian women, some of whom were refugees from the war. His face has been pixellated to protect his privacy. The war in Ukraine caused a huge surge in migration and displacement as over four million Ukrainians have fled their homeland as refugees, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR - mostly women and children, as men were expected to stay.
This has created chaotic conditions at border crossings and train stations with neighbouring countries such as Poland which are ideal of sex traffickers to operate in. Shirin Tinnesand, refugee and migration coordinator at the NGO said that Ukrainian refugees are at risk of being exposed to human trafficking, prostitution, organ donation. Ukrainian refugees arriving at a welcome and information hall in the port of Nynashamn, about 60 km south of Stockholm, Sweden.
Many sex traffickers dress like humanitarian workers to blend in and operate undetected. Tinnesand claims that video footage seen by her organisation appears to show a man wearing a yellow vest with a volunteer written on his back approaching Ukrainian women at the main train station in Krakow, Poland and offering them free food and accommodation for a year if they board a 'special bus' to Germany. She added that many of them dress like humanitarian workers to blend in and operate undetected.
With Putin's war in Ukraine entering a new phase and the Ukrainian government ordering all civilians to leave the Donbass, the flow of refugees into Europe will not relax any time soon.
A Ukrainian refugee has described how she narrowly escaped the clutches of an American trafficker posing as a UN volunteer. Margaerita Plotnick was with her mother and teenage cousin when she was approached at a refugee reception centre by the stranger who offered to take her to the US.
