Love blossoms in Kiev while Russians remain isolated and alone

War, sanctions and President Vladimir Putin’s pariah status on the world stage are hitting Russians exactly where it hurts: in their love lives.

It was only six years ago that Moscow hosted the World Cup finals – the most watched sporting event in the world – and it felt like a vibrant global city with visitors from every corner of the globe. The dating scene in Moscow was explosive in the month of the tournament and Tinder was at the centre of it. The number of Tinder couples increased by 66 per cent in the first week, with most users coming to Russia from the US, UK and Germany.

That was an era that seems to have long been forgotten in Moscow.

Hundreds of Western companies, including Tinder, have now left Russia due to Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine, leaving their former customers devastated and relying on inferior imitators.

Meanwhile, Tinder is enjoying huge popularity in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, even though people there – exhausted by violence and insecurity – need the app more than ever.

The hotspots are located around the main avenue Khreshchatyk, the Golden Gate and in bars and restaurants around the historic Pechersk district.

One happy couple in their early 40s told The Daily Beast they were grateful for Tinder. “It gave us sexual freedom, which is priceless at our age,” said Svitlana, 41. “I usually suggest we meet in cafes, but I think men don’t like to pay every time – they feel taken advantage of and say they prefer to meet in parks.”

In fact, this spring, you can see many lovers in Kyiv’s blooming parks. After two years of air defense alerts and explosions, Kyiv still looks like the romantic and free city it has been since Ukraine declared independence from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1991.

Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv and a former heavyweight boxing champion, recently told The Daily Beast that he is not familiar with Tinder but closely follows the city’s birth rate. He said it was no surprise that Ukraine’s birth rate had fallen by almost a third compared to pre-war levels, with so many men leaving their homes to fight, but he was proud of every mother and baby born in the capital. “Over 30,000 babies were born in Kyiv during the war,” Klitschko said.

Tinder not only plays a romantic role in Ukraine, it has also saved lives.

Ekaterina Popova, 42, told The Daily Beast she “reluctantly” downloaded Tinder shortly before the war after a toxic relationship. Her niece, Polina Denisenko, 27, had persuaded her aunt to join her on the app. “I was tired of Ekaterina’s complaints, so I told her, finally download Tinder, it will open new doors and new opportunities,” she said.

Their first Tinder date played out like a romantic war movie. They had planned to meet at a restaurant, but that morning the war started, so they met on the floor of the subway, where Kyiv residents were taking shelter from Russian bombs. Instead of getting drunk and having wild sex, they spent the evening discussing how to save their loved ones from the advancing Russians.

Popova said her date proved to be much more than what he had stated on his Tinder profile from day one. “When we matched, Tinder proved miraculously helpful. Our story was an avalanche: He saved his mother, I saved my child. On the third day, we left together and evacuated our loved ones from the war zone,” Popova told The Daily Beast.

The wild sex later took place in a tiny room in a music studio that had been converted into an air raid shelter.

Popova and her partner have been together since their first date.

Her niece Polina Denisenko also had a happy ending: she married her Tinder match, 31-year-old Yevgen, last year in the middle of the war.

On the other side of the front, memories of Tinder are still painful.

For many young Russians, Tinder had become a household name for dating. Muscovite Alyona Rebechenkova downloaded the app at the age of 19 shortly after the World Cup. She told The Daily Beast that it was the beginning of a new life: “It was like a welcome into the world of a different kind of man. To many, many new possibilities.” Back then, Russia was also a different country, full of visitors from all over the world.

Putin’s war changed everything. The massacre in Ukraine, the fear of mobilization, the country’s isolation and political repression have made millions of Russians depressed. According to the latest social study, up to 29 percent of Russians are currently seeking professional psychological help. After a year of war, up to 56 percent of Russians felt stressed, and by September – when the Kremlin declared mobilization – up to 62 percent of Russian patients complained to their psychologists about panic attacks.

Initially, Western sanctions made access to Tinder more difficult – but not impossible. The app’s user numbers increased by more than 200,000 in the first year of the war, from February 2022 to April 2023. Tinder users found at least five ways to circumvent the restrictions and continue using their premium accounts.

Rebechenkova smiles as she recalls the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, when she and her friends would meet at home on the couch, displaying one of their Tinder accounts on the TV screen, “to see guys and have a lot of laughs.” At 24, Rebechenkova, a pretty brunette, had two university degrees and a great job. She rented her own apartment and went on dates several times a week. That was her lifestyle for several years before the war started and all major Western companies left Russia.

And then, in June last year, disaster struck for the Russian dating scene: Tinder announced that it would be shutting down its service in Russia.

Mikhail, 24, said he spent months “not knowing how to carry on living – it was as if the sky had fallen to earth.” Much of his correspondence went through his Tinder account. He tried to circumvent the ban and use a VPN, but that messed up the geolocation and he couldn’t find potential dates in his Moscow neighborhood.

Users of the Russian Tinder counterpart VK Dating are also reportedly having problems with the GPS function: “Your geolocation is incorrectly defined, so users from other cities appear on the screen,” AppleInsider reported.

When Tinder left Russia, Mikhail was “severely depressed” — it was his favorite app, he told The Daily Beast.

Rebechenkova said: “The news that we were leaving Tinder devastated us. We didn’t know where to meet, how to find each other, what life would be like without Tinder.”

At the same time, the Kremlin is urging women to have more children: “If we want to survive as an ethnic group, … there must be at least two children,” Putin said in February.

But Putin had no suggestion as to how and where people should find their partners. “I have no idea where to find the right men. I’m even thinking about going to IT conferences now. Tinder was a super convenient app in our Soltsevo district – you could see where the guys were in the neighborhood,” Rebechenkova told The Daily Beast.

Ironically, Cure, the latest dating app to gain popularity in Moscow, was originally developed by two Ukrainians. But it still doesn’t have anywhere near as many millions of Russian users as Tinder.

“According to our study, Tinder was popular among women aged 25 and over. It was definitely important for improving demographics, it was an important platform, it liberated the sexual relations of its users in Russia,” Alyona Popova, a Russian politician and expert on domestic violence, told The Daily Beast. “The fact that global platforms are leaving Russia is a loss, the international platform Tinder has been taken away from this generation. The fear of war is still high, as is Russia’s self-isolation.”

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