Charges under Article 149 § 3 of the Criminal Code (human trafficking) have been laid against two women believed to have “sold” residents of the Crimea and Sevastopol

The SBU established that she had “sold” a young woman in difficult financial circumstances into sex bondage in Turkey for 2,400 US dollars

Officers of an anti-trafficking unit of the Zaporizhya Regional Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs have freed people being brutally exploited on a livestock farm in the Zaporizhya area

The Crimean Prosecutor’s Office informs that in 2005 and 2006, a Simferopol resident forced five fellow Crimeans to work for him through violence and threats

Officers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Anti-trafficking unit for the Zhytomyr region have uncovered a setup for selling people from the region into labour bondage in Poland where they worked as beggars

The new handbook prepared is intended not only for students in seminaries, but should be of use to priests in outlying parishes where people do not have information about the dangers of travelling abroad for work and normally ask their priest for advice

A Memorandum of Intent on countering human trafficking was signed on Monday between the Mission of the International Organization for Migration in Ukraine and the oil company “Galnaftogas”

A Sumy regional anti-trafficking unit has uncovered a set up for sending young women from Ukraine to Turkey to work as prostitutes

Officers of the Kharkiv Anti-trafficking unit have identified a pseudo modelling agency which was recruiting young women for the United Arab Emirates, supposedly to work as models, but in fact for the sex industry

One of the main priorities for this important initiative will be to help combat crimes linked with human trafficking and to help people who have become labour or sex slaves abroad

The Simferopol District Court has sentenced two people from the Crimea to 8 years and 5 years imprisonment for taking Ukrainian women to Russia to be “sold” into sex bondage

An excellent initiative planned by the Central Department for Youth and Family to raise awareness of human trafficking situations

The accused are alleged to have coerced or deceived adolescents, aged between 12 and 17, into being filmed in pornographic material which they planned to sell on the Internet

Twenty help line operators who will give assistance to human trafficking victims and help prevent others falling into such traps are being trained by the OSCE Mission in Kyiv.

While acknowledging that efforts are being made to combat this crime, the US State Department’s annual report criticizes Ukraine for lack of measures to protect victims and prosecute traffickers.

This is the first time in Ukraine that mobile operators will be joining forces with the IOM to combat human trafficking and to raise public awareness of the need to protect people’s rights when working abroad

It was thanks to civic organizations which pushed amendments to legislation that human trafficking is now considered to be not only those crimes connected with recruitment and transporting people abroad. The requirement that the border has to be crossed has been removed

They are believed to have organized a network in western regions of Ukrainian for recruiting young women into sexual slavery

The UN Special Rapporteur’s report on his visit to Ukraine points out that with most Western countries now no longer requiring visas to come to Ukraine, young people are increasingly becoming the victims of sex tourists

IOM Ukraine Counter-trafficking Programme Coordinator, Fredric Larsson pointed out that the level of labour exploitation was four times higher than that for sexual bondage, but warned that the figures could be distorted since victims of sexual bondage are reluctant to tell people what they went through.