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New York Times
- 7 January 2023 09:00
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Investigators have uncovered extensive evidence of sexual abuse by Moscow forces, including rape and forced nudity. Kremlin officials have repeatedly denied allegations of human rights violations.
On her eighth or ninth day in Russian detention, Olha, a 26-year-old Ukrainian, was tied to a table, naked to the waist. For 15 minutes, the interrogator shouted obscenities at her, then threw a jacket over her and left seven other men in the room.
"It was to scare me", she remembers. "I didn't know what would happen next."
Sitting in Olha's cramped kitchen weeks later in Kherson in southern Ukraine, Anna Sosonska, an investigator in the prosecutor general's office, heard her confess — an account of forced nudity that, prosecutors say, added to a stack of evidence that Russian forces had used sex crimes as a weapon of war in the countries they once ruled.
"We are finding this problem of sexual violence in every country that Russia occupied," says Sosonska, 33. "Every country: Kyiv region, Chernihiv region, Kharkiv region, Donetsk region and also here in Kherson region."
After months of bureaucratic and political delays, Ukrainian officials are accelerating the documentation of sex crimes, which are widespread and devastating in wartime but often remain hidden under layers of shame, stigma and fear.
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Ukrainian women's accounts of sexual violence by Russian soldiers
"We found all kinds of cases of war crimes: rape, forced nudity, sexual torture" inflicted on men, women and children, said Ms. Sosonska. A pattern of crimes is emerging, she added. "Now we see that there is a line of war crimes in the Russian army and among Russian commanders."
Denial of crimes
Russian officials have consistently denied allegations of human rights abuses, despite ample evidence and accounts gathered by Ukrainian and international investigators. A spokeswoman for Russia's Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, recently dismissed a report by the UN Commission on Human Rights as unsubstantiated evidence and no more than "rumors".
After investigating several areas from which Russia withdrew, an independent international commission reported to the United Nations in October that "a number of war crimes committed in Ukraine" included cases of sexual violence against women and girls.
The victims ranged from over 80 years old to a 4-year-old girl forced to perform oral sex with a soldier, which is rape, the report said. It detailed more than a dozen cases involving gang rapes, family members forced to watch a relative being sexually assaulted and sexual violence against prisoners.
Iryna Didenko, who heads the prosecution's Department for investigating such crimes, has already opened 154 cases of sexual violence related to the conflict. The real number, she said, is "much, much higher."
In a previously occupied village in the Kiev region, psychologists found that one in nine women had experienced sexual violence, she says. Hundreds of people suffered sexual violence and torture in Russian detention centers, she added.
Trauma is vivid and inhibiting. Viktoriya, a 42-year-old woman in the Kiev region, trembles as she describes how, in early March, Russian soldiers shot her neighbor to death and then took her and her neighbor's wife away to be raped.
"The fear still remains," she said. "Sometimes when there's no electricity, I get scared and I feel like they might come back."
A survivor's account
Viktoriya was one of the few survivors willing to speak publicly. She asked that only her name be used and that her face not be photographed, as several other women have done, for fear of retribution from Russian forces.
But the stigma and judgment of neighbors and acquaintances was also a constant pain, she says.
"They are gossiping about me and I mostly stay at home," she adds.
The grief was such that her neighbor Nataliia, who was also raped and whose husband was killed, took refuge abroad. Her 15-year-old son killed himself in the weeks after the attack, Ms. Didenko said.
A psychologist and lawyer, Mrs. Didenko met Natalia when she visited their village after the Russian troops withdrew. Before the war, her department had handled domestic violence crimes, and she was well aware of the difficulties women faced in reporting the crimes, she said.
Much of this has to do with the stigma of rape in a religiously conservative society, but there is also a deep distrust of authorities in a post-Soviet system that has rarely focused on the needs of victims and often blames them.
"From our experience with domestic violence, we realized that victims don't talk about it in principle," says Didenko. It's even more difficult in a war when they can be accused of fraternizing with the enemy, she adds.
"No one will run to apply to us," she says. "That's why we decided we should go to them."
The need to help survivors of sexual violence in Ukraine is great, activists say. Some women's shelters in the country have started receiving war victims. Aid organizations such as Women for Women International and the Andreev Foundation began offering mobile gynecological clinics and counseling sessions.
Of the more than 800 women and girls the foundation has counseled since the beginning of the occupation, 22 have admitted to experiencing sexual violence in the war. Eight were younger than 18 years old.
Suicidal thoughts
Some survivors have expressed suicidal thoughts, says Anna Orel, assistant project manager at the foundation. "One girl said she wanted to cut her skin off," she says. "She couldn't stand the smell of men's perfume."
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Narratives of Ukrainian men, victims of sexual violence by Russians
Others feared military uniforms, even Ukrainian soldiers and men in general.
"Many of them don't want to continue living," says Orel. "It's very, very important to have a professional person hold their hand and go through this with them."
From the accounts of those who have come forward, there is evidence that Russian commanders knew about the rape or even encouraged it, officials said. Wayne Jordash, a British lawyer advising Ukrainian prosecutors, said he had seen signs of acquiescence by commanders among the 30 cases he had reviewed.
Didenko says there was a clear pattern of behavior when Russian troops occupied an area: "The ground forces arrive and the rapes start on the second or third day."
Witnesses reported commanders ordering rape or giving instructions that suggested they condoned it, such as telling soldiers to get some rest.
In one instance Didenko described, a commander told his men "ok, go" while he waited outside a house. A soldier was heard saying, "We'll just beat her," about a woman, and "we'll rape her."
In another case, eight Russian soldiers raped and assaulted a man who was stopped at a checkpoint.
"These are not isolated cases", says Didenko.
There is an even clearer pattern, she said, of organized sexual abuse in detention facilities run by Russian troops, police officers and security forces.
Investigators have found at least four large detention facilities in the city of Kherson, with graphic evidence of systematic torture under the Russian occupiers.
In the basement of a business center, prisoners slept on pieces of cardboard in complete darkness and carved numbers to count the days and messages on the wall. "God give me strength!" read one.
"This was the torture chamber," says Yaroslav Manko, 30, a prosecutor from the region. Police found a rubber baton, metal handcuffs and an electric grill that Mr. Manko said was used to burn the fingers of detainees. They also found a list of the names of Russian officers who had worked there.
Torture in custody
There have been numerous sexual abuses at the detention centers, including baton rape and electric shocks to the genitals, prosecutors and city officials said.
Olha, the woman from Kherson, says that over 14 days in detention this fall, she was threatened with rape and punched and kicked in the head and chest, breaking a rib. The Russians put clips on her legs, arms and ears to send an electric current through her body, she said, and dunked her in water to worsen the shocks.
Her interrogators knew that she worked with volunteers who brought aid from Ukrainian territory to civilians in Kherson. They asked her to film a propaganda video and distribute supplies on behalf of President Vladimir Putin's ruling United Russia political party.
Another activist, Andriy, 35, was held for five days in August. The Russian occupiers accused him of aiding the underground partisans and demanded that he renounce his friends and acquaintances.
"They give them electric shocks, then they are given a break," he said. "While you are recovering, they beat you with sticks or fists." The bruises on his back were in the shape of a Z, a symbol of Russian fighters in Ukraine, he said. Electric shocks to his earlobes knocked him unconscious. The blows to his genitals still cause pain four months later.
The similarity of evidence and confessions across cities, describing methods of torture, interrogation and officers by Russia's main intelligence agency, the FSB, has convinced Ukrainian prosecutors that the abuses can be traced back to the Russian leadership.
"It cannot happen that a soldier did this without an order," said Mrs. Didenko. The FSB "came efficiently knowing their work, tortured everyone in the genitals," she said. "It's definitely a system."
Many Ukrainians and their supporters say they believe Russia is out to crush Ukraine's spirit of resistance and destroy its society.
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The UN-backed Commission of Inquiry reveals sufficient evidence of Russian crimes in Ukraine
"It is part of a genocide," said Ms. Didenko, "but for us to prove it we need time."
Translated by: Forca Jashari
