‘Fear persists’: Ukraine uncovers sex crimes where Russian troops ruled

KHERSON, Ukraine — On her eighth or ninth day of detention in Russia, Olha, a 26-year-old Ukrainian, was tied to a table, shirtless.

For 15 minutes, her interrogator used obscenities against her, then covered her with a jacket and ushered seven other men into the room.

“It was to scare her,” she recalls.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen next.”

Weeks later, sitting in Olha’s cramped kitchen in Kherson, southern Ukraine, Anna Sosonska, an investigator with the attorney general’s office, listened to her recount the ordeal — an account of forced nudity that prosecutors say it added to the backlog of evidence that Russian forces had used the sex crimes as a weapon of war in the places they once ruled.

“We have seen this problem of sexual violence in all places occupied by Russia,” said Sosonska, 33.

“Everywhere: Kiev region, Chernihiv region, Kharkiv region, Donetsk region, and here too, Kherson region.”

After months of bureaucratic and political delays, Ukrainian officials are speeding up the documentation of sex crimes, frequent and devastating in wartime but often stay hidden under layers of shame, stigma and fear.

“We found all kinds of war crimes cases:

rape, forced nudity, sexual torture” inflicted on men, women and children, Sosonska said.

And he added that a pattern for crimes is taking shape.

“Now we see that there is a line of war crimes in the Russian army and among Russian commanders.”

Russian authorities have repeatedly 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 Human Rights Commission on the grounds that the testimonies were baseless and nothing more than “rumours and gossip”.

Research

After investigating some areas from which Russia has withdrawn, an independent international commission informed the United Nations in October that “a series of war crimes committed in Ukraine” included cases of sexual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 girl’s 4 years forced to perform oral sex on a soldier, which constitutes rape, according to the report.

The report detailed more than a dozen cases of gang rape, family members being forced to witness a relative being sexually assaulted, and sexual assaults against inmates.

Iryna Didenko, who heads the prosecutor’s department investigating these crimes, has already opened 154 cases of sexual violence related to the conflict.

The real number, he said, is “much, much higher.”

In a former occupied village in the Kiev region, psychologists found out 1 in 9 women she had been sexually assaulted, she said.

Hundreds of people have been subjected to sexual assault and torture in Russian detention centres, he added.

The trauma is raw and inhibiting.

Viktoriya, a 42-year-old woman from the Kiev region, cringes as she describes how, in early March, Russian soldiers killed her neighbor and then took her and the neighbor’s wife away for rape.

“The fear still lingers,” he says.

“Sometimes when the power goes out, I get scared and feel like they might come back.”

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, like other women, for fear of retaliation by Russian forces.

But stigma and judgment from neighbors and acquaintances was also a permanent pain, she said.

“They gossip about me and I mostly stay home,” she said.

The pain was such that her neighbor Natalia, who was also raped and whose husband was murdered, took refuge abroad.

His 15-year-old son had suicidal tendencies in the weeks following the attack, Didenko said.

Didenko, a psychologist and lawyer, met Nataliia when he visited her village after the withdrawal of Russian troops.

Before the war, her department had dealt with domestic violence crimes and was well aware of the difficulties women faced reporting crimes, she said.

Much of it has to do with the stigma of rape in a society conservative religiousbut there is also a deep distrust of the authorities in a post-Soviet system that has rarely focused on the needs of the victims and often blamed them instead.

“From our experience with domestic violence, we realized that, in principle, victims don’t talk about it,” Didenko says.

It’s even more difficult in a war, when they can be blamed fraternize with the enemy.

“No one will come running to us for help,” he said.

“That’s why we decided to go to them.”

Trauma

The need to help Ukrainian victims of sexual violence is immense, activists say.

The country’s few women’s shelters have begun to welcome war victims.

humanitarian organizations such as Women for international women and the Andreev Foundation they started offering mobile gynecological clinics and counseling sessions.

Of the more than 800 women and girls the foundation has assisted since the invasion began, 22 have acknowledged having been subjected to sexual assault during the war.

Eight were under the age of 18.

Some survivors have expressed suicidal thoughts, said Anna Orel, deputy director of projects for the foundation.

“One girl said she wanted to cut her skin,” she explained.

“I couldn’t stand the smell of men’s perfume.”

Others were afraid of military uniforms, even of Ukrainian soldiers, and of men in general.

“Many of them don’t want to go on living,” Orel said.

“It’s very, very important that some professional take their hand and go through this with them.”

From the accounts of those who have come forward, there is evidence that the Russian commanders knew about the violations or even encouraged themaccording to the authorities.

Wayne Jordash, a British lawyer who advises Ukrainian prosecutors, said he saw signs of acquiescence from commanders among the 30 cases he had reviewed.

Didenko said there was a clear pattern of behavior when Russian troops took over an area:

“The ground forces arrive and the rapes begin on the second or third day.”

Witnesses said the commanders ordered the rapes or gave instructions suggesting they would forgive them, such as telling soldiers to look for something to relax

In one of the cases described by Didenko, a commander told his men:

“Okay, let’s go,” as he waits outside a house.

A soldier was heard to say, “We’ll just beat her,” about a woman, and “We’re going to rape this one.”

In another case, eight Russian soldiers raped and assaulted a man who was stopped at a checkpoint.

“These are not isolated cases,” Didenko said.

There is an even clearer pattern, he said, of organized sexual abuse in detention centers run by Russian troops, police and security forces.

Investigators have found at least four large detention centers in Kherson city with clear evidence of systematic torture under the Russian occupiers.

In the basement of a shopping mall, inmates slept on pieces of cardboard in complete darkness and beads carved on the wall to count the days and messages.

“Oh God, give me strength,” one prayed.

“This was the torture room,” said Yaroslav Manko, 30, the region’s prosecutor.

Police found a rubber baton, metal handcuffs and an electric grill which Manko says was used to burn the detainees’ fingers.

They also found a list with the names of Russian officers who had worked there.

Extensive sexual abuse, including rape with a baton and electric shocks to the genitals, occurred in the detention centers, according to prosecutors and city officials.

Olha, the woman from Kherson, testified that during the 14 days she was detained last fall she was threatened with rape, punched and kicked in the head and chest, and broke a rib.

The Russians pinned her legs, arms and earlobes to send electric currents through her body, she said, and doused her with water to make downloads worse.

His interrogators knew that he worked with volunteers who brought aid from Ukrainian territory to the civilian population of Kherson.

They asked him to record a propaganda video and distribute supplies on behalf of United Russia, the president’s political party. Vladimir Putin.

Another activist, Andriy, 35, was detained for five days in August.

The Russian occupiers accused him of helping the underground partisans and asked him to expose his friends and acquaintances.

“They give you electric shocks and then let you rest,” she said.

“When you recover, they beat you with batons 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 rendered him unconscious.

The discharge in his genitals is still causing him pain four months later.

The similarity of evidence and reports between the cities, detailing methods of torture, interrogations and agents of Russia’s top intelligence agency, the FSB, have convinced Ukrainian prosecutors that the abuses can be attributed to the Russian leaders.

“It cannot be that a soldier did this without an order,” Didenko said.

The FSB “arrived efficiently, knowing their job, tortured everyone on the genitals,” he said.

“It’s certainly a system.”

Many Ukrainians and their supporters say they believe Russia intends to crush Ukraine’s spirit of resistance and destroy its society.

“It’s part of a genocide,” Didenko said, “but we need time to prove it.”

c.2023 The New York Times Society