San Francisco Frontiers - In a Ukrainian strip club, the war is laid bare

Since Russia's 2022 invasion, exhausted troops are the main clientele of the Flash Dancers club in the centre of the northeastern city, just 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Russian forces.

For some customers, it provides an "escape" from the war, said Valerya Zavatska -- a 25-year-old law graduate who runs the club with her mother, an ex-dancer.

But many are not there just for the show. They "want to talk about what hurts," she said.

The dancers act as confidantes to soldiers bruised -- mentally and physically -- by a three-year war with no end in sight.

"Very often" they want to discuss their experiences and feelings, Lisa told AFP in a fitness centre, where the dancers practised choreography to an electro remix of the "Carmen" opera ahead of that night's show.

"The problem is that they come in sober, normal, fine. Then they drink, and that's when the darkness begins," said Zhenia, a 21-year-old dancer.

Instead of watching the performance, soldiers sometimes sit alone at the bar, crying.

Some even show the women videos from the battlefield -- including wounded comrades or the corpses of Russian soldiers.

"It can be very, very difficult, so I personally ask them not to show me, because I take it to heart too much," Lisa said.

But Zhenia -- who used to study veterinary medicine -- said she watches the footage with something a professional interest, trying to understand how a soldier could have been saved.

- 'Family gathering' -

When performance time arrived, they put on red underwear, strapped into 20-centimetre (eight inch) platform shoes and covered their bodies with glitter -- a trick to stop married men getting too close, as the shiny specks would stick to them.

The music started. One dancer twirled around a pole, another listened attentively to a customer, while a third sat on a man's lap.

The Flash Dancers describe themselves as more "Moulin Rouge" than a strip club, and say the dancers do not enter sexual relations for money.

Prostitution -- illegal in Ukraine -- is not uncommon in areas near the frontline.

Most soldiers -- though not all -- respect the boundaries.

Sometimes friendships have been struck up.

Zhenia recalled how one soldier wrote a postcard to her, picked out by his mother -- a "wonderful woman" who now follows Zhenia on social media and sometimes sends her messages.

"I know their children, their mothers," she told AFP.

Some tell stories from their vacations, talk about their lives before the war and even come back with their wives.

"It's like a family gathering," said Nana, a 21-year-old dancer with jet-black hair.

- Killed dancer -

A Colombian soldier fighting for Ukraine sipped sparkling wine on a red bench having paid almost $10 to get into the club.

Coming here "clears your mind," the 37-year-old ex-policeman -- known as "Puma" -- told AFP.

"It entertains us a little. It takes our minds off the war."

But even in the club's darkened basement, the war has a way of creeping inside.

Many of the regulars have been wounded and the dancers sometimes take gifts to hospitals.

And "an awful lot of guys who have come to us" have been killed, said Zavatska.

"Just this month alone, two died, and that's just the ones we know," she said, adding that one left behind a one-year-old infant.

A Russian strike in 2022 killed one of the group's dancers -- Lyudmila -- as well as her husband, also a former employee of the club.

She was pregnant at the time. Miraculously, her child survived.

The club closes at 10.00pm, an hour before a curfew starts.

Air raid alerts sometimes force them to stay longer, until they can head home in a brief period of relative safety.

But in Kharkiv that never lasts long.

The dancers, like everybody else, are often woken by Russia's overnight drone and missile barrages.

Even after a sleepless night, the women head back, determined to put on a performance.

"The show must go on," Zavatska said.

"We have to smile."

T.Martin--SFF