Ukraine Eyes Legalising Adult Content Industry To Fund 30,000 Military Drones With Taxes

Ukraine is weighing a proposal to legalize its adult entertainment industry as part of an effort to generate new tax revenue for the country's war against Russia, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. The bill, backed by lawmaker Yaroslav Zhelezniak, who chairs Ukraine's parliamentary finance committee, argues that bringing pornography production and distribution into the formal economy could raise as much as $25 million annually — enough, by Zhelezniak's estimate, to fund the purchase of roughly 30,000 drones for the country's military.

Producing, possessing or distributing pornography currently remains illegal in Ukraine, carrying a potential prison sentence of up to seven years under Article 301 of the country's Criminal Code. Despite the ban, the adult content industry has continued to operate and expand within the country, reportedly with the assistance of corrupt police, creating a legal gray zone that has increasingly put content creators at odds with Ukraine's tax authorities. The bill co-sponsored by Zhelezniak seeks to amend the criminal code so that adults who film and distribute intimate content consensually are no longer subject to imprisonment.

The push for legalization gained momentum after Ukrainian tax authorities began pursuing adult content creators for unpaid taxes, following the disclosure of earnings data from Fenix International, the U.K.-based parent company of OnlyFans. That data reportedly showed nearly 7,900 Ukrainians earned more than $131 million on the platform in 2023 alone, with some creators earning upwards of $20,000 a month. The situation has created what Zhelezniak has called a "tragicomic" legal contradiction: creators who declare their income to pay taxes risk criminal prosecution for violating pornography laws, while those who avoid declaring income face separate charges for tax evasion.

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The dilemma was thrust into public view by OnlyFans creator Svitlana Dvornikova, who said police searched her home and seized roughly $20,000 in cash along with a laptop and hard drives after she was investigated despite having paid taxes on her earnings. Dvornikova later filed a petition — later featured on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's official website — describing herself as a "conscientious taxpayer" and arguing that the nearly $900,000 she had paid in taxes was worth "hundreds of Russians killed on the front line." The petition gathered more than 25,000 signatures within a week, adding public pressure on lawmakers to resolve the legal contradiction facing creators like her.

Supporters of the legislation, including tax attorney Lesia Mikhalenko, who has represented more than 100 OnlyFans models in Ukraine, have characterized the production of pornography by consenting adults as a "victimless crime" and argued that continuing to prosecute it diverts scarce law enforcement and judicial resources away from more pressing wartime needs. Zhelezniak has acknowledged that the projected $25 million in annual tax revenue is modest when measured against Ukraine's roughly $120 billion annual defense budget requirement, but has maintained that the funds could still make a meaningful contribution toward drone procurement, a key component of Ukraine's ongoing war effort against Russia.

The bill, first registered in November 2024, passed its initial reading in Ukraine's parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, in July and is currently awaiting a second reading before it could become law. Before Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainian authorities had largely turned a blind eye to the country's adult entertainment industry, but the war's mounting fiscal demands have prompted lawmakers to reconsider how previously overlooked sectors of the economy might be formalized and taxed to support the broader military and financial needs of the country.

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