Some Russian girls, such as Svetlana, are lucky enough to achieve financial independence as prostitutes in the affluent west. But many others are stripped of their independence, and seized by traffickers who press them into sexual servitude.
Anti-trafficking organizations said last year that some 50,000 women and children from Russia and other former Soviet republics are sold into slavery in the United States every year. Other destinations include Turkey, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and China. __ Human Trafficking Russia
… between 1992 and 2002, an estimated 500,000 women and girls were trafficked from the former Soviet Union, mostly from Russia. __Russian Slavery
Powerful criminal organisations, with links extending into the Kremlin, have made a profitable Russian industry out of selling young Russians into bondage. Russia is becoming known as a “Land of Slaves,” rather than Slavs.
The loss to Russia from forced trafficking of young Russian girls is bad enough, but when combined with the voluntary emigration of young women abroad for marriage, education, and better financial opportunity (including self-employed prostitution), this human flow abroad constitutes a genuine “womb drain” with significant loss of fertility. This is no way to improve Russian birthrates.
If one also considers the swelling brain drain of Russia’s finest minds, one has yet another reason to question the future of Russia.
“In the next 10-20 years we will have an enormous decrease in the number of potential mothers and fathers,” he says. “There’s a very small cohort approaching reproductive age.” Young women born in the immediate post-Communist period of the early 1990s are starting to have babies of their own, but there simply aren’t that many of them. __Population Reality
It is against this backdrop — using the excuse of “Russian Humiliation” — that Putin invaded Crimea and east Ukraine. The economic fallout from that rash behaviour has not been pretty. But as an unconventional means of increasing “Russian population,” perhaps the invasion and annexation of neighboring nations can be successful, temporarily.
Capital flight and brain drain from Russia continue to ramp up, and it is likely that the selling of human slaves from the Russian heartland will also accelerate — to make up for financial losses caused by low oil prices. Although the population of ethnic Russians is declining, humans in Russia are still considered to have economic value as sex slaves and common labour.
http://alfin2500.blogspot.com/2012/12/sex-slavery-and-child-trafficking-multi.html
http://gvnet.com/humantrafficking/Russia.htm
Stuck in the sticks with a poorly paid job and a husband on the bottle, these women can be easily tempted by an offer of easy money to be earned abroad: basically their only chance to earn a decent income and see some other country. This is how Anna R, from the Smolensk oblast, ended up in a Turkish brothel. __ Russia Land of Slav-ery
If a Russian girl is able to make her way to the affluent west on her own, and offer her serivices on her own terms, she is lucky. Tens of thousands of other Russian girls every year are not so lucky, and are left with almost no choices of their own.
al fin next level 
I’m suspicious of the claims of anti-trafficking groups. Maggie McNeill has done a good job on her site The Honest Courtesan exposing a good deal of these groups as consensual prostitution prohibitionist organizations (and some as money making scams) that conflate freely chosen prostitution with sex slavery and pull trafficking numbers out of nowhere. If 50,000 Russian women left Russia last year for sex industry jobs I bet the overwhelming majority were consensual. Prudish types have a hard time facing the sexual realities of human nature and anti-trafficking groups can to be money making frauds (such as Somaly Mam) or Prude fanatics trying to misrepresent freely chosen prostitution as something it is not.
It can be difficult to determine what it is that is being consented to. Young girls may consent to a job as a waitress in London and find herself locked in an apartment building in South Africa, required to service 10 to 30 men a night for a year just to “pay back” expenses to the human trafficking organisation.
Citizens of normal countries find it impossible to understand how thoroughly the Russian mob is integrated into government and society in Russia and east Ukraine. Since the mob knows where the girls’ families live, they have little recourse should they want to change their minds.
You can’t read about these things in Russian state propaganda outlets such as RT, etc. Human slavery, trafficking, the orphanage scandal, the public health disaster, and a long litany of other hidden disasters do not see the light of day in Putin’s Russia — and rarely are given airtime or press time in the media of more affluent nations. People just don’t want to hear about them, and if they do hear, the natural reaction is to deny that things could possibly be that bad. Human nature.
You don’t have to be a prude fanatic to find dozens of tragic trends inside Russia today.
Reblogged this on Citizens, not serfs.