War, sanctions, and President Vladimir Putin’s pariah status on the world stage are hitting Russians right where it hurts: their love lives.
It was just six years ago that Moscow hosted the finals of the soccer World Cup—the most-watched sporting event on the planet—and it felt like a buzzing global city with visitors from all corners of the Earth. The dating scene in Moscow for the month of the tournament was explosive and Tinder was the hub. The number of Tinder couples jumped by 66 percent during the first week, with largest number of users coming to Russia from the U.S., the U.K., and Germany.
That was an era which already feels long forgotten in Moscow.
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Hundreds of Western companies, including Tinder, have since left Russia thanks to Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine, leaving former customers devastated and reliant on inferior knock-off versions.
Meanwhile, Tinder is thriving in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, where people—exhausted from violence and uncertainty—need it more than ever.
The hotspots are around the central avenue of Khreschatyk, Golden Gates, and at bars and restaurants around the historical Pechersk neighborhood.
A happy couple in their early forties told The Daily Beast that they were grateful to Tinder. “It gave us sexual freedom, which is priceless in our age,” 41-year-old Svitlana said. “Normally, I suggest we meet at cafes, but I think men don’t like to pay every time—they feel used and say they prefer to meet in parks.”
Indeed, many lovers can be seen in Kyiv’s blooming parks this spring. After two years of air defense alerts and explosions, it still looks like the romantic and free city it has been since Ukraine’s declared independence from the collapsing Soviet Union in 1991.
Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv and former world heavyweight boxing champion, recently told The Daily Beast he wasn’t familiar with Tinder, but said he was keeping a close eye on birth rates in the city. It is no surprise that Ukraine’s birth rate dropped by almost a third compared to the pre-war period with so many men leaving home to fight, but he said he was proud of every mother and baby born in the capital. “Over 30,000 babies have been born in Kyiv during the war,” Klitschko said.
Tinder is not just playing a romantic role in Ukraine, it has also saved lives.
Ekaterina Popova, 42, told The Daily Beast she had “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 getting tired of Ekaterina’s complaints, so I told her, download Tinder already, it will open new doors, new opportunities,” she said.
Her first Tinder date played out like a wartime romantic movie. They had planned to meet at a restaurant, but the war began that morning so they convened on the floor of the subway where Kyiv residents were sheltering from the Russian bombs. Instead of getting drunk and having wild sex, they spent the evening discussing how to rescue their loved ones from the advancing Russians.
Popova said that from day one, her date proved to be so much more than what he had put on his Tinder profile. “In case of our match, Tinder turned out miraculously helpful. Our story was an avalanche: he was saving his mother; I was saving my child. We set off together on the third day and we evacuated our loved ones from the war zone,” Popova told The Daily Beast.
The wild sex would happen later in a tiny room of a music studio turned into a bomb shelter.
Popova and her partner have been together since their first date.
Her niece, Polina Denisenko, also found a happy ending, marrying her Tinder match, Yevgen, 31, last year in the midst of the war.
On other side of the front line, memories of Tinder are still painful.
Tinder had become the generic word for dating to many young Russians. Moscow resident Alyona Rebechenkova downloaded the app at the age of 19 soon after the World Cup. She told The Daily Beast that it was the start of a new life: “It was like a welcome to the world of a different sort of men. To lots and lots of new opportunities.” At the time Russia was a different country, too, full of visitors from all over the world.
Putin’s war changed everything. The massacre in Ukraine, fear of mobilization, the country’s isolation and political repression have made millions of Russians depressed. Currently up to 29 percent of Russians are seeking professional psychological help, according to the most recent social study. After one year of the war, up to 56 percent of Russians felt stressed and by September—when the Kremlin declared mobilization—up to 62 percent of Russian patients had complained to their psychologists about panic attacks.
Initially, Western sanctions made Tinder harder—but not impossible—to access. The app’s user numbers jumped 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 avoid the restrictions and continue to use their premium accounts.
Rebechenkova smiles when she recalls the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, when she and her girlfriends got together on a couch at home and put one of their Tinder accounts on the TV screen “to check out dudes and have a good laugh.” By the age of 24, Rebechenkova, a pretty brunette, had two university diplomas and a great job. She rented her own flat and went on dates several times a week. That was her lifestyle for several years before the war began and all major Western companies left Russia.
And then last June, disaster struck for Russia’s dating scene. Tinder declared that it had ended its services in Russia.
For months, Mikhail, 24, said he “did not know how to live on—it was as if the sky crashed to Earth.” A ton of his correspondence was on his Tinder account. He tried to get around the ban and use VPN but that messed up the geolocation and he couldn’t find potential dates in his Moscow neighborhood.
Users of the Russian analogue of Tinder, VK Dating, also reportedly have trouble with the GPS function: “Your geolocation is wrongly defined, so users from other cities appear on screen,” AppleInsider reported.
When Tinder left Russia, Mikhail was “seriously depressed”—it was his favorite app, he told The Daily Beast.
Rebechenkova said: “The news of Tinder leaving crushed us, we did not know where to meet, how to find each other, what life without Tinder would be like.”
At the same time, the Kremlin is urging women to have more babies: “If we want to survive as an ethnic group… there must be at least two children," Putin said this February.
But Putin had no suggestion on how and where people should find their partners. “I have no idea where to find the right men, I’m now even considering visiting IT conferences. Tinder was a super-comfortable app in our Soltsevo district—you could see where the guys were in your neighborhood,” Rebechenkova told The Daily Beast.
Ironically, the latest dating app to gain popularity in Moscow, Cure, was originally developed by two Ukrainians. But it still has nowhere near the million Russian users who were on Tinder.
“According to our study, Tinder was popular among women from 25 and older. It was definitely important for improving demography, it was an important platform, it liberated its users’ sexual relations in Russia,” Alyona Popova, a Russian politician and expert on domestic violence, told The Daily Beast. “Global platforms leaving Russia is a loss, the international platform Tinder was taken away from this generation. The fear of the war is still strong, as well as Russia’s self-isolation.”
