It is now 15 years since the closure of LS-Studio, the largest paedophile material production network in history. No one was convicted. Now the girls are of age.
Please note that the following report was written before the war began.
It’s a cold February afternoon in a café in Kiev. We receive a text message from Olga L., a 27-year-old Ukrainian. She is not going to go to the appointment. She finally declines EL ESPAÑOL’s proposal to participate in a report about her past as a model. We get the same answer from Jana C., another 28-year-old from Kiev who worked for the same controversial studio. She politely declines to talk and pleads: „Please don’t contact me about this again. Never again,“ she writes before blocking us to make sure.
A few years ago, these girls became international stars. They were the object of desire of thousands of internet users around the world. They were true muses in the most sordid corners of the internet. They had a legion of perverse followers and clandestine admirers from all over the world. They were sex symbols. They were… girls between the ages of 7 and 14 stripping in front of a camera.
On 28 July 2004, the world’s largest child pornography production organisation in history collapsed. There were 1,500 girls involved in the case. The Ukrainian police, with the cooperation of the FBI, arrested the main perpetrator, Alexander Chursin, and shut down his million-dollar business: a shady photo studio called LS-Studio.
The uproar was so great that the information about the operation was given directly by the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, through the head Vitaly Yarema. News agencies around the world picked up the story. An exemplary sentence was expected given the magnitude of the case. Mysteriously, none of the 1,500 families wanted to file a complaint. They did not even cooperate with the investigation. Alexander Chursin was soon released. The biggest child pornography scandal in history went unpunished.
At the same time, all the material recorded between 2001 and 2004 went viral without control through clandestine forums and paedophile communities on the internet. The business collapsed but the dark legend was born. The deep web became a kind of temple of LS-Studio. Thousands of worshippers created discussion boards, tribute videos and tribute pages to the studio. Photos and videos were trafficked. Girls became celebrities from the darkest corners of the web. They still are. Most of them don’t know it.
LS-Studio, the dark legend
What exactly was LS-Studio? The life project of Alexander Chursin, a twenty-something photographer from Kiev with two obsessions: female modelling and pre-teenage girls. Back in 1999, he armed himself with a digital camera and started convincing girls in his city (no older than 14) to do photo shoots for him. Ukraine is a poor country where modelling is one of the main career opportunities for women. He therefore had no difficulty in finding candidates willing to be filmed in exchange for 300 grivnas (10 euros). He often contacted the offspring through their parents. He would take them home and play music for them on an old radio cassette. The girls would do a striptease in their own way and he would record them himself.
It was the beginning of the new century and the internet was a new invention where people from all over the world came to make their fortune. Chursin tried uploading that material under the name Alex Models. The results were much better than he expected. He soon began to receive offers for the material from American, Canadian and German internet users.
Within two years, he had amassed quite a bit of wealth. But Chursin wanted more. In 2001, he decided to take the final step in turning his shady hobby into a million-dollar empire: he decided to expand the business. He placed an advertisement on Ukrainian public television in which Alex Models solicited girls between the ages of 7 and 14 for modelling sessions. He paid $50 an hour. Hundreds of families came to the call, unaware (or not) that their daughters would be filmed naked.
„He put them to play and got rich.“
With all these premises and an injection of cash from which it is unknown where it came from, Chursin started thinking big. He decided to turn his business model around and changed the name. Alex-Models became LS-Studio. He started producing a huge amount of photos and videos, which he then uploaded to a website. He divided it into several channels:
LS-Land, where the girls only posed.
Ls-Show, where they were made to dance.
LS-Magazine, where several girls played together and did everyday activities such as drawing or cooking.
In all cases, the children took off their clothes until they were naked. „This guy got some girls to play, filmed them and got rich,“ sums up John, an American Internet user who now participates in tribute forums to the studio.
A woman to reassure the girls
The first thing Chursin did was to get out of the way. He stopped taking pictures. To make the best of the situation, he put a 25-year-old Ukrainian photographer in her place. The girl interacted with the pups, who felt much safer with her than with a man. She was the one who told them how to play or how to take off their clothes. She was key to this story.
Every two weeks an update was published with 3,000 new photos and about twenty videos. Each issue was thematic. For example, in the set called Cowboys, the girls were dressed up as cowboys. In another called Merry Christmas, the girls were dressed in Christmas costumes.
The sets were shot in a rudimentary studio in Kiev or in a modest flat that Chursin rented. He often shot outdoors and the girls were taken to a nearby island, where no one could discover them. He called these sets LS-Island.
The rise and fall of the studio
Business boomed. Subscriptions started pouring in from all over the world and money started pouring in. Chursin bought a Porsche. The company expanded its staff: it hired make-up artists, decorators, tailors, dressmakers, video editors… and a male photographer who worked in the final stretch of the studio’s life and who is now part of its black legend.
„LS-Studio was like a Playboy for girls and also had a company structure, with a lot of workers who rotated frequently,“ says a German who was a subscriber until 2004. He has a thorough knowledge of LS’s history. „I don’t consider myself a paedophile. I am not. A naked body is not sex. There was no sex here at any time. They didn’t even touch them. The girls were playing and having fun,“ he says to justify his fondness for this material. He is ignoring the fact that the girls were naked and in clearly sexual poses.
Two figures in the shadows
Legend has it that the success of LS-Models was only possible thanks to two other partners of Chursin who were not prosecuted and whose identities were always kept in the shadows: a Russian who provided the capital for the company and an American who allegedly secured protection for the studio; a supposedly important figure with contacts in the highest circles who prevented the studio from even being investigated by the justice system. Legend has it…
Something happened in early 2004 that turned everything upside down. Chursin began to get nervous and to claim in the forums that he was not committing crimes, that he was making art. He claimed to be calm because he said he was complying with all international legislation, perhaps knowing that he had some kind of unofficial protection. But that protection ended up running out.
The closure: three unverified versions.
In July 2004, the Ukrainian police and the FBI struck. They raided three Ukrainian cities: Kiev, Kharkiv and Simferopol. They closed the studio and arrested Chursin, who had amassed a fortune. They froze his accounts and put him in prison. Millions of dollars and the Porsche were seized.
There are several theories as to what triggered the operation that summer: the first, the official one, is that the police had been after the case for a long time, and they killed it as soon as the FBI lent them a hand. The second says that in the last period of LS-Studio, Chursin hired a male photographer who went too far with one of the girls; she told about it and triggered the storm.
The third version, the conspiracy theorists‘ favourite, tells of a quarrel between the alleged American partner and those in high places who offered him protection. The motive would have been purely economic. „Don’t forget that the advertisement for girls was even shown on Ukrainian public television. This case was not just about Chursin. There were very important people involved. What was the FBI involved in this? Maybe it was a matter of state. Or of states. But we’ll never know,“ says one of the forum members who supports this theory.
Be that as it may, the case exploded and became the summer media scandal of 2004 in Ukraine. Mikhail Andreyenko and Sergei Bakaev, well-known civil servants, went on TV to give details. Prosecutor General Vitaly Yarema offered all the information and promised toughness. Never before had a paedophile material production network with 1,500 victims been dismantled.
But, inexplicably, the case was quickly shut down. It soon disappeared from the media. None of the 1,500 affected families wanted to cooperate with the investigation. Did they know what had happened to their daughters? Were they threatened? Did they prefer to forget and not have their names splashed across the media? It is not known and the families still do not want to talk about it. The only certainty is that Chursin was tried in 2005 and released. It is not known what agreement he reached with whom, or why his case went unpunished.
Maya Poprotskaya
Of the 1,500 girls involved, 15 to 20 are the main protagonists of this story. The most common. In terms of the number of sets they starred in and the legion of followers they garnered. One of the best known, whose stage name was Dasha, – the girl’s real name is Maya Poprotskaya -, was born in December 1992 and lives in Kiev. She is currently married and has a daughter.
Maya Poprotskaya was one of the most popular models.
Ukraine and the sexualisation of girls.
There are a lot of people obsessed with these girls; they look for them on social networks, they traffic with their data, they write to them… The girls were very young then and now maybe they don’t even remember. Maybe they don’t even understand what they are talking about when a pervert comes on their Facebook and says things to them. They are legends, but they don’t know it“, says an internet user on the Chan forums, one of the places on the internet where there is most information about this case.
And much more fundamentally, the Ukrainian mentality. A country with a much more lax conscience about child nudity than Spain. Dimytro is a fixer from Kiev who has been working with EL ESPAÑOL during this report and reveals that „not long ago I proposed to my journalist friends to investigate about a children’s dance academy in Kiev that teaches girls between 10 and 12 years old to do striptease. That’s happening today, you don’t have to go back to 2004. It’s not unusual to find things like that here“.
„Ukraine is a country of women, or don’t you know that“, they tell you in Kiev when you bring up the subject. And they are partly right. Although the numbers are now much more balanced, Ukraine has had historical demographic gender inequalities. Successive wars have scorched entire generations of males. As a result, for some periods of time, the proportion of women in this country has been much higher than that of men. [And so it is likely to be again in the coming decades. mb.]
Another scandalous studio from Kiev – LoLand.
Here is the story of its uncovering –>
SONYAGATE – or: The end of LoLand.
This scenario, coupled with the fact that it is one of the poorest countries in Europe and suffers from a macho mentality, results in an almost routine commodification of women. From a young age. Sources claim that the families in the LS case knew that their daughters were being photographed naked, but did not think it was a big deal. Beyond that, Ukraine is currently in the eye of the storm for having become a regular destination for sex tourism and for issues related to surrogacy. Another proof of the scarce economic outlets for women in this former Soviet republic.
The protagonists, today
EL ESPAÑOL, after a long investigation, has managed to find some of the characters in this story. All of them are still in or around Kiev. Alexander Chursin lives out of the spotlight and continues to dedicate himself to the production of pornography, but now only plays legal material with girls over 18. At least that is the official version.
We have also tracked down three of those girls. One of them is Maya Poprotskaya, who never replied to our letter. Her social networks have been inactive for three years. …
The other two traced girls (Olga L., known as Lena and Jana C., whose stage name was Lesya) prefer to forget. „Understand. Talking about it means acknowledging that their parents took them as children to be photographed naked. It’s not nice. Neither that, nor putting your name in Google and seeing it linked to a child pornography case,“ our translator reasons to justify this refusal. Both of them are university graduates and neither of them are modelling anymore.
Small altars to girls who no longer exist
And the fans? More active than ever. Some have even created software to rank the girls. The deep web is almost a sanctuary to this studio. More than any other: „Today there are still thousands of this kind all over the world. In Colombia, Brazil, Cambodia…. But LS was the first, the one who invented it,“ says one user of an LS-themed forum. Being a pioneer was one of the keys to success, but not the only one: „The colours, the costumes, the naturalness, the concept… There’s something in these photos that catches you and I haven’t found it anywhere else“, summarises another user.
The protagonists want to forget, but the memory of our time is called the internet. And now, in the darkest corners of the Internet, small altars pay tribute to girls who no longer exist. They grew up and forgot what happened. Girls who are not aware that they were shining stars. Who are now women, but whose childhood has already been recorded for eternity on the most perverse pages of the web.
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Maya Poprotskaya, alias Dasha, can still be found active on the Internet. She did a couple of Videos, which show her in her everydays life, often also featuring her now 10 years old daughter, and her – as I assume – second husband, who seems to be an American, helping to instruct ukrainian Soldiers (as briefly hinted at in one of those videos – mb., 04.06.2023).
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NEW –> SONYAGATE – or: The End of LoLand.
https://montebas.blog/sonyagate-or-the-end-of-loland/
Eva Ionesco I – The Scandal Child
Eva Ionesco II – „The Children of the Night“. News from her wildest years (11-13).
Eva I., the youngest model ever to appear in a Playboy centerfold (at the age of 11), after having been the object of her mother’s pornographic recordings for years and having been referred by her to Polanski and to the naked-girl photographer Bourboulon, and finally had to do sexual nude scenes in Maladolescenza (Puppy Love) in the leading role, tells in her two autobiographical childhood accounts how she experienced her mother’s sexual interest in her, and what she undertook sexually – out of revenge, or because she soon thought herself mature enough.
New–> Seductive nannies and the fight against masturbation.
A Viennese nanny from the Orient passes the little girl around in her circle of acquaintances, where women are eager to introduce the child to „their“ sexual practices. Unimaginable today, unless you see something similar re-emerging in the form of „pedomums“. The case was reported at a psychiatrists‘ congress in Vienna in 1903.
»Everything that happened was very pleasant. I enjoyed it.«
That’s what a 20-year-old testified before a Swiss high court about sex between her and her father. She sued him anyway.
The Traunreut Man – or: the case of the JM Girl.
Here it is interesting to read what the mother later said in court about the girl’s condition, what impression the policewoman who interviewed her had, and what the Janice herself had to say about it, after apparently surprising many viewers of the videos.
Little Girls and Sex: A Glimpse at the World of the Child Prostitution.
They take part in videos that their parents make, they work in massage parlors, their career starts at 11, or even at 9. Here, for once, interviews with children in their active phase, not later, when they sue their parents.
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Source: EL ESPAÑOL. 23 February, 2019
montebas 