KHARKIV, Ukraine - When Lisa, 20, laces into her ultra-high heels for her shift at a strip club in Ukraine’s Kharkiv, she knows that aside from dancing, she will have to comfort traumatised soldiers.
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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 from Russian forces.
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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.
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But many are not there just for the show. They “want to talk about what hurts,” she said.
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The dancers act as confidantes to soldiers bruised — mentally and physically — by a three-year war with no end in sight.
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“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.
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“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.
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Instead of watching the performance, soldiers sometimes sit alone at the bar, crying.
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Some even show the women videos from the battlefield — including wounded comrades or the corpses of Russian soldiers.
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“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.
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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.
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When performance time arrived, they put on red underwear, strapped into 20-centimetre 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.
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The music started. One dancer twirled around a pole, another listened attentively to a customer, while a third sat on a man’s lap.
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The Flash Dancers describe themselves as more “Moulin Rouge” than a strip club, and say the dancers do not enter sexual relations for money.
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Prostitution — illegal in Ukraine — is not uncommon in areas near the frontline.
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Most soldiers — though not all — respect the boundaries.
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Sometimes friendships have been struck up.
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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.
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“I know their children, their mothers,” she told AFP.
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Some tell stories from their vacations, talk about their lives before the war and even come back with their wives.
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“It’s like a family gathering,” said Nana, a 21-year-old dancer with jet-black hair.
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A Colombian soldier fighting for Ukraine sipped sparkling wine on a red bench having paid almost $10 to get into the club.
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Coming here “clears your mind,” the 37-year-old ex-policeman — known as “Puma” — told AFP.
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“It entertains us a little. It takes our minds off the war.”
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But even in the club’s darkened basement, the war has a way of creeping inside.
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Many of the regulars have been wounded and the dancers sometimes take gifts to hospitals.
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And “an awful lot of guys who have come to us” have been killed, said Zavatska.
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“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.
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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.
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She was pregnant at the time. Miraculously, her child survived.
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The club closes at 10.00pm, an hour before a curfew starts.
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Air raid alerts sometimes force them to stay longer, until they can head home in a brief period of relative safety.
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But in Kharkiv that never lasts long.
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The dancers, like everybody else, are often woken by Russia’s overnight drone and missile barrages.
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Even after a sleepless night, the women head back, determined to put on a performance.
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“The show must go on,” Zavatska said.
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“We have to smile.”