Dark tourism grows

Ukraine war sites draw thrill-seekers

Spanish traveller Alberto Blasco Ventas looked out at Ukraine's destroyed Irpin bridge, blown up to stop Russian troops in 2022 and now a hotspot for thrill-seeking tourists visiting the country.

Russian forces had planned to cross the bridge in their attempts to seize the Ukrainian capital Kyiv at the beginning of the war.

The Russian army has since retreated hundreds of kilometres away, but launches near-daily missile and drone strikes on the Ukrainian capital that Blasco Ventas chose as his vacation spot.

"It's my first time in a war zone," the 23-year-old software engineer said. "I'm a little bit scared, I'm not going to lie, because you never know."

He was on a "dark tourism" tour offered by one of a dozen or so Ukrainian companies specialising in a marginal but growing sector - allowing tourists to visit locations of tragic events.

To get to Ukraine, he shrugged off concerns expressed by his family and got on a flight to Moldova, followed by an 18-hour train ride.

The wannabe influencer filmed every step of the trip, which he planned to post on his YouTube channel - followed by 115,000 people - where he has already chronicled the "most horrible psychiatric hospital" in the United States and "the most dangerous border" in the world, between China, Russia and North Korea.

Before the war, Ukraine already hosted tens of thousands of tourists every year in Chernobyl, which saw the world's worst nuclear disaster in 1986.

Answering critics that would consider such trips morbid or immoral, Blasco Ventas insisted he was acting "with respect".