The Gulf States ‘Harsh Enlightenment’
On March 20 of this year, Maria Kovalchuk, a twenty-year old Ukrainian model, influencer, OnlyFans content creator, and antiwar activist was found lying on the side of a road in Dubai, the largest city in the United Arab Emirates, after going missing from a party there ten days before. Her arms and legs were broken, and so was her spine. She was taken to a local hospital, where she remains in critical condition. According to her mother, “’She has no documents, no phone, nothing. She has undergone three operations. And she cannot speak.’”
This snippet could be a brutal, singular anecdote—of a vacation, and an evening, and now a portion of a life, gone wrong—but its location is Dubai, and its protagonist is a woman, and its details have been repeated many times before. The stories made from these details are a window into how the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, and other Gulf state regimes function: a system of brute extraction that preys not only on the weakest and most alienated but on laborers and white collar workers normally deemed secure. What makes this system relevant to America is that it exists with the help of American weapons and money—and it is expanding in ways that are coming back to haunt Americans.
Understanding how starts with understanding what happened to Maria Kovalchuk, whose last day living a foreseeably normal life started with an OnlyFans post alerting her followers that she was attending “a party with ‘two men who introduced themselves as representatives of the modelling business.’” She also spoke to her mother, telling her that “she would be staying with these two representatives for the night,” and that she was leaving on a flight to Thailand the next day. But, according to her mother, “the promoter who organized these parties did not see her” at the party, and the next day she did not arrive at the airport.
Investigations by the Dubai Police into how what was supposed to be Kovalchuk’s last night in Dubai went so wrong resulted in an official statement that “she entered a ‘restricted construction site alone’ and fell from an undisclosed height.” Why a model about to board a flight would go to an isolated construction site alone, ascend past a safe level, and then manage to fall from an undisclosed height was not addressed by the Dubai Police.
According to The Daily Star, one of the international dailies which picked up the story, Kovalchuk had ended up at a sex party where wealthy Dubai magnates pay women to act out their fetishes. The existence of these “porta potty parties” are not verified, though reports of them circulate online, nor is Kovalchuk’s presence at one verified or, for the moment, verifiable. But verified sources back up this general picture of Dubai, called by supporters “the Gulf’s reigning logistics and financial hub and one of the Middle East’s few real bastions of cosmopolitanism.”
Read more at The Libertarian Institute.