The lingering trauma of Russian rape in Ukraine

After Daria fled from her Russian-occupied village to western Ukraine, she spent weeks restlessly wandering the streets. Whenever she grew tired of walking, she would sit on park benches and tell anyone who would listen — even perfect strangers — what the Russian soldiers did to her.

“I wanted to tell everyone, but there was no one to talk to,” recalled Daria, a 32-year-old illustrator. “I could not confide in my family members, and I did not know anyone in town. I had to somehow deal with it on my own.”

Daria said Russian soldiers raped her twice in March 2022 in Havronshchyna — a small village about 30 miles from Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital — where a range of alleged war crimes, including sexual violence, have been documented by Ukrainian authorities and international media.

For two years after the assault, Daria said, she wrestled with shame. She could not tell her father what happened, and she struggled to be intimate with her partner. She said in an interview that she was ready to tell her story, to erase the stigma of sexual assault and help herself and other victims heal.

Her plight resonates with many other Ukrainians. Behind the battlefields of Europe’s largest war in 80 years, authorities and aid groups say, there are thousands of women, men and children who have been sexually assaulted by Russian soldiers and have been struggling to piece their lives back together.

Ukraine’s government, despite facing one of the toughest moments since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 with almost nonexistent battlefield progress, has made significant efforts to document and prosecute sexual violence cases.

But victims and advocates say that it has failed to put in place an adequate support system for survivors, leaving them largely on their own to deal with the financial and psychological effects of their trauma.

Some women said they had to pay for medical checkups or psychotherapy sessions from their own pockets. Many who were dealing with insomnia and panic attacks relied not on the government for help, but on charities, which organize group therapy sessions and connect women with volunteer therapists.

Sexual violence is a war crime under international law, but not under Ukrainian law. Because of that, many victims have not received the same legal status and financial support as victims of other war crimes. Parliament is currently considering a law that would create a legal definition of sexual violence while also establishing measures to provide free therapy for victims and rapid financial help for those in urgent need.

Despite evidence gathered by the United Nations suggesting that sexual violence by Russian forces in Ukraine has been widespread, it remains a mostly hidden casualty of the war. Of almost 137,000 reports of war crimes investigated by Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office, only 308 involve sexual violence.

Experts on sexual violence during conflict said that this was a significant number considering the challenges of operating during a war, and authorities attributed the low percentage to the reluctance of most victims to report such crimes.

Anna Sosonska, the head of the division for conflict-related sexual violence in Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office, said the majority of victims do not want to relive their traumatizing experience, or risk the stigmatization that might come with speaking publicly. Many survivors live in territories occupied by the Russian army, she said, further complicating attempts to prosecute.

“Rape is the most underreported and dismissed crime,” said Wiola Rębecka-Davie, a New York-based therapist specializing in conflict-related sexual violence. “Even more in the time of war, when carrying out statistics on sexual violence is never a priority.”

While atrocities since the invasion have received international media scrutiny, sexual assault by Russian forces has been a concern in Ukraine since Russian proxy forces poured into eastern Ukraine in 2014, igniting eight years of simmering hostilities and the occupation of parts of Ukrainian territory. Some victims are coming forward only now after dealing with shame and fears of stigmatization.

The New York Times interviewed almost two dozen women, sexual violence experts, psychologists and activists for this article. Seven survivors of sexual assault, ages 32 to 62, including a safety engineer and a theater director, provided accounts of their experiences. The earliest case involved a 56-year-old anesthesiologist, who said Russian troops sexually abused her in October 2017 in Donetsk. The most recent involved a 48-year-old civil servant, who said she was assaulted in August 2022 in Kherson.

The women agreed to speak using only their first names to maintain privacy involving a sensitive topic; several agreed to be shown in photographs. Their accounts have largely been corroborated by the prosecutor general’s office and SEMA, the global network for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence.

The crimes being investigated by Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office include rape, attempted rape, mutilation of genitals and forced nudity, among others. Some people were forced to watch the sexual abuse of loved ones. The cases concern people from 4 to 82 years old from a big swath of Ukraine’s territory, including the regions of Kyiv, Kherson, Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia.

When asked for comment, the press office of the Kremlin said, “Most often claims of Ukrainian representatives are groundless.”

Halyna, 61, a pensioner from Dmytrivka, said she was assaulted by a Russian soldier in his 20s.

“First, he raped me with his fingers,” Halyna said. “Then with the rifle. He laughed and laughed and laughed throughout the whole thing. Whenever I cried, he told me to shut up or else he would kill me.”

When he was finished, Halyna said, she was bleeding.

For over a year, she said, she could not sleep. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw Russian soldiers climbing her fence. Despite that, she still lives in the home where the assault happened.

“Where else should I go?” she said. “My pension comes down to 2,700 hryvnia,” (about $66) a month.

Experts say Ukraine has had an impressive track record when it comes to advancing investigations to actual criminal proceedings, despite the difficulty of prosecuting soldiers from an opposing army. As of this month, Ukrainian investigators have sent 30 indictments of Russian soldiers to the court; five have been convicted in absentia.

But experts said that by focusing primarily on the legal process, the state has neglected the material and psychological needs of the survivors.

“Legal avenues take a lot of time, and they are expensive,” said Emily Prey from the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based research institution. “What’s needed is interim reparations, access to free health care and access to free housing.”

Kateryna Pavlichenko, Ukraine’s deputy interior minister, said that documenting sexual crimes has become a priority for the government. Authorities trained special police units to work with survivors, she said, and set up nine support centers across the country offering psychological and medical help.

She said that over the past few years, the government had developed new investigation methods, putting priority on the protection of victims and witnesses, including their safety, privacy and dignity.

Some women who gathered the courage to speak to authorities said that instead of getting help, they found more humiliation.

Halyna said that as soon as the first Ukrainian soldiers arrived in her village, she started asking them to take her to a hospital. She was suffering from a high fever that she believed was caused by infected wounds from the rape. But it was not until nearly a month later that she was taken to Kyiv to see a doctor and two investigators from the prosecutor’s office.

“Take off your clothes and lie down on the chair,” one of the investigators instructed her, Halyna said, recounting the episode. “The doctor won’t be looking at you, I will.”

She said she had to beg the gynecologist to be properly examined and tested for HIV and venereal diseases, and she paid for it from her own pocket. There were no witnesses in the room, but several months later she recounted the episode to SEMA.

Despite her frustration, she said she can understand why she was treated this way. “The full-blown war had just begun,” she said. “There were no services in place, no one was prepared.” She said she believed support for survivors had improved since then.

Daria, the illustrator, said that after she reached relative safety, she went to a few psychotherapy sessions, which she paid for herself, but that they did not help. So she just kept walking.

After about six months, something shifted. She was determined to move on from surviving to living.

She picked up new hobbies. She finally confided in her mother and her boyfriend — and this past spring, she told her father what happened to her.

One day, during a train commute, Daria felt a sudden need to draw. Back home, she sketched two pairs of eyes — hers and her father’s — lurking through gaps in the attic wall, and watching Russian soldiers enter Havronshchyna in March 2022.

Over the following months, she drew scenes of the occupation and of the assault on her. Representing her trauma on paper empowered her to finally report her case to authorities.