Crude war tourism in Lviv

Wednesday 21 January 2026

Lviv has long been a city of thresholds. For centuries she has stood at the hinge between empires, absorbing influences without surrendering her own grammar of civility. Since 2022 she has also stood at the threshold of war, not at the front line, but at the moral frontier where violence elsewhere presses upon daily life. Sirens interrupt coffee. Funerals punctuate weekends. Refugees arrive with plastic bags containing the remains of their former homes. Trauma is not abstract here; it queues for bread and waits for trams. In such a city, conduct matters.

Against this background, a dispiriting phenomenon has taken root. A subset of temporary volunteers and visitors now arrive in Lviv bearing the posture of spectators rather than guests, and sometimes the demeanour of revellers rather than helpers. The city is treated as a stage set for proximity to danger without its costs, a place to collect stories and images, to drink heavily, to posture loudly, and then to depart unmarked by responsibility. What might have been solidarity curdles into something closer to crude war tourism.

The most visible symptom is relentless drunkenness. Bars and clubs exist in Lviv as they do in any European city, and Ukrainians have not suspended ordinary pleasures in deference to grief. But the pattern has become familiar: groups of foreign visitors who drink from afternoon into night, who shout across streets, who treat air raid sirens as interruptions to be mocked rather than warnings to be heeded. Excess becomes a badge of bravado, a performance of being close to war without submitting to its discipline. For local people, many of whom have lost relatives or await news from the front, this behaviour is not merely irritating. It is wounding.

Closely allied is offensive conduct towards local residents. Shop staff are harangued in English and expected to comply. Women are propositioned with a sense of entitlement that confuses hospitality with availability. Complaints are brushed aside with the claim that the visitor is here to help, as though intention licensed discourtesy. This is not assistance. It is a demand to be indulged.

Most corrosive of all is the casual racism that too often accompanies this posture. Ukrainians are reduced to caricatures: brave but backward, noble but provincial, useful as symbols rather than as people. Refugees are photographed without consent. Soldiers are treated as props for social media. There is an assumption, sometimes voiced openly, that suffering confers a kind of moral simplicity upon those who endure it, rendering them grateful for any attention, however clumsy or self-serving. Such attitudes reproduce, in miniature, the hierarchies that have so often denied Eastern Europe her voice. They are particularly grotesque when expressed in a city that has taken in displaced people from across the country and beyond, and that has paid in blood for the right to define herself.

This behaviour is inappropriate not only because it offends local sensibilities, but because it fails to grasp the nature of trauma. War does not announce itself solely in ruins and uniforms. It settles into nervous systems. It sharpens tempers and shortens sleep. It makes noise louder and laughter rarer. To arrive in such an environment and behave as though one were on an extended stag weekend is to insist that one’s own experience must dominate, even where others are struggling to hold themselves together. It is a failure of imagination and of empathy.

Yet it would be dishonest, and unjust, to leave the picture there. Alongside this ignoble minority stands another group whose presence in Lviv deserves respect. These are the volunteers who arrive quietly, learn a few words of Ukrainian, and ask how they can be useful. They drive ambulances and deliver medical supplies. They train medics, repair generators, teach, translate, fundraise, and then do the unglamorous work of accounting for every hryvnia. They listen more than they speak. They drink little, if at all, and when they do, they do so as guests, not conquerors of the night. They understand that solidarity is a discipline.

What distinguishes this minority is not heroism, but humility. They recognise that Lviv is not a theme park of resilience, but a living city under strain. They accept that help begins with respect, and that respect begins with restraint. They do not centre themselves in the story of Ukraine’s war. They place themselves, deliberately, at its margins, where assistance is most effective and least visible.

Lviv will continue to receive visitors. Some will come out of curiosity, some out of fear, some out of genuine commitment. The city does not demand sainthood. She asks only that those who pass through her streets remember where they are. This is a place where grief walks openly, where patience is a finite resource, and where dignity has been defended at terrible cost. To behave crudely here is not merely bad manners. It is a moral failure.

If Lviv is to remain open to the world, the world must learn to meet her on her own terms. Those who cannot do so would do better to stay away. Those who can, and who come to help rather than to consume, will continue to find a city that, even in wartime, understands hospitality as a shared obligation, not a licence to forget oneself.