A 77-year-old former high school teacher, turned out in a neat dress and hat, has been creating a quiet revolution in the villages of Kherson region in southern Ukraine.
Standing before a group of 10 women in a tent in the center of a village in Ukraine’s south last summer, she recounted her ordeal three years ago under Russian occupation.
“What I went through,” said the woman, named Liudmyla, her voice wavering. “I was beaten, I was raped, but I am still living thanks to these people.”
Beginning last year, Liudmyla and two other survivors, Tetyana, 61, and Alisa Kovalenko, 37, have spoken at a series of village meetings to raise awareness about conflict-related sexual violence. The meetings have been among the first efforts by survivors of sexual assault to bring into the open one of the most painful aspects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine: what prosecutors and humanitarian workers say is widespread sexual assault of Ukrainian women under Russian occupation.
Liudmyla and Tetyana asked that their surnames and village names not be published to protect their privacy. Ms. Kovalenko has long spoken openly about the assault on her, which occurred in 2014 during the war with Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Relatively few women in Ukraine have come forward to report cases of rape during the conflict because of the stigma attached to sexual assault in Ukrainian society, which is deeply religious and conservative, especially in rural areas. Prosecutors have registered more than 344 cases of conflict-related sexual violence in Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February 2022, 220 of them women, including 16 underage women.
But women’s groups estimate the real number runs into the thousands, with at least one case in almost every village that has been occupied by Russian troops. United Nations human rights reports have documented dozens of crimes of sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers but have not detailed evidence of any abuses by Ukrainian soldiers. A recent report noted only “two cases of human rights violations against alleged collaborators committed by the Ukrainian authorities.”
Support groups and rights organizations have assisted many women with health services and psychological rehabilitation in the 1,800 settlements recaptured from Russian occupation, but said that not all of them were prepared to give testimony to the police. Many victims remain silent and isolated, and in some cases suicidal, according to members of SEMA Ukraine, part of a global community spanning 26 countries that helps survivors of conflict-related sexual violence with psychological, medical, legal and financial support.
Set up in 2019 by Iryna Dovhan, herself a survivor of a vicious assault by armed separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014, SEMA Ukraine has encouraged 15 survivors to come forward and join its community over the last six months, bringing the total membership to more than 60 — all survivors of sexual violence in war, she said in an electronic message.
This month Ms. Dovhan is leading a group from SEMA Ukraine to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, where they will show a film featuring some of Ukraine’s survivors of sexual violence during the war. They are also presenting an appeal, along with a group of Ukrainian male survivors, for Russia to be named by the United Nations secretary general as a party responsible for crimes of sexual violence committed in Ukraine.
Liudmyla was one of the few who reported her assault to the Ukrainian police. Her daughter, Olha, insisted she report the crime once she escaped from Russian-controlled territory. “I was against it,” Liudmyla recalled in an interview, “but Olha said the Russians have to pay. Of course she was right to expose this crime.”
The attack against her as she described it was particularly brutal. A soldier banged on her kitchen door at 10:30 p.m. one night in July 2022. Scared that he would break the door down, she opened it, and the soldier smashed her in the face with his rifle butt, knocking out her front teeth. He dragged her by the hair, hit her repeatedly with his rifle butt in the ribs and kidneys, and threw her on a couch, throttling her. He made cuts on her abdomen with a knife, and then raped her.
“I was helpless against him,” she said. He left six hours later, saying he would come back in two days and kill her with a bullet.
Badly battered, with four broken ribs, Liudmyla hid at a neighbor’s house and later traveled with a family to Ukrainian-held territory to join her daughter.
She subsequently received a diagnosis of tuberculosis and was hospitalized for six months. “I was depressed, I could not eat,” she said.
But two years after the event, she found purpose in speaking to women’s groups. She said it was the community of survivors at SEMA Ukraine that helped her recover.
The SEMA Network was founded in 2017 by Dr. Denis Mukwege of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who has spent decades working with victims of sexual violence during wartime. The network promotes solidarity within communities, bringing women together to speak out and tell their truths, and helping them stand up for their rights. The word SEMA means “speak out” in Swahili.
“Thanks to this community I started to eat,” Liudmyla said.
“I am holding myself together so that the world knows that they are aggressors, and despots, even to civilians,” she said of the Russian forces.
Ms. Kovalenko, a filmmaker who in 2019 became one of the first women to join SEMA Ukraine, has recorded many women’s testimonies for a documentary. “It’s important to talk in these village communities,” she said. “It can help to reduce the level of stigma, so that people understand that they are not being judged.”
Ms. Kovalenko was detained in an apartment and sexually assaulted by a Russian intelligence officer when covering the early conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014 as a filmmaker. She was one of the first women in Ukraine to speak publicly and to rights organizations about her ordeal.
“Compared to 2019, it is a revolution that women are speaking out now,” she said. “It’s a real revolution when a woman like Mefodiivna speaks out, and Tetyana.” She referred to Liudmyla by her patronymic, Mefodiivna, in a term of respect.
Tetyana, who owns a store with her husband, Volodymyr, in a village in the Kherson region, gave her first interview to a journalist from The New York Times, and spoke for the first time at a village meeting last summer.
Russian soldiers occupying their village frequently visited their store, and when it was closed they would break in. Then one night in April 2022, two soldiers broke into their house. They shot at Volodymyr — he managed to dodge the bullet and hide, she said — but they caught Tetyana as she tried to run away. They pinned her down in the yard, pulling her hair and beating her, and then one of the men raped her. They left only when an artillery attack began on the village.
After months of counseling, and stays in the hospital and refuges, Tetyana said she had discarded feelings of rage and hate but still could not bear the physical touch of a man, including that of her husband. She was unsure whether she would manage to speak at the meeting organized by SEMA Ukraine.
She finally did speak, but kept to a prepared script, explaining the stages of trauma a victim of sexual assault will display, and how to help them.
The most important consideration, she said, was to reassure victims that they are safe.
Over the longer term, she compared the trauma of sexual violence to sand clogged in an hourglass. “If it is blocked, then nothing will pass through,” she said.
It was clear she spoke from experience, but she was talking to women in the audience who had also lived through the terror of occupation. One woman said she had been buried under rubble when her house was hit in a shell strike, while another said she had been forced to host Russian soldiers in her home.
“All of us have some level of vicarious trauma after living in occupied communities,” Tetyana said. “You need to work out your pain so it does not stay inside of you for too long.”
