One was violated with a Kalashnikov, another raped repeatedly after seeing her husband shot. Now,...
Andy Jehring, Olha Cherenkova
11–13 minutes
Halyna was at home alone when the Russians came knocking, saying they were ‘looking for Nazis’. The 62-year-old widow was ordered at gunpoint to run around naked in the winter snow before being sexually violated with a Kalashnikov in the most grotesque manner.
In another case, Olha Cherniak, 49, was forced to listen to her teenage son’s torture from a neighbouring prison cell as Russian soldiers threatened to rape him.
Tetiana, 61, saw her husband get shot in front of her before she was pinned to the ground and raped. She escaped, was caught, and raped again.
A Russian soldier knocked on the door of 77-year-old teacher Liudmyla Mefodiivna and bashed her teeth out with the butt of his rifle, before assaulting her. These are just a few of the 376 testimonies of sexual violence
committed by Russian soldiers against Ukrainians – including children – since 2022.
Not included is the account of Oleksandr Gudilin, 34, a male prisoner of war, who told us how a comrade was forced to perform a sex act on himself.
Although Oleksandr has informed the Ukrainian security services, he has not formally logged what he witnessed as war-related sexual violence.
Alisa Kovalenko is on a mission to record the harrowing testimonies of war victims
Nor has he recorded how he was himself forcibly stripped and electrocuted countless times during nearly three years in prison. Some victims feel too ashamed to come forward, fearing that neighbours in their villages will know what happened to them.
Others, thankful to have escaped with their lives, question what good it will do to report the crimes of Vladimir Putin’s forces.
It is no wonder, then, that some experts say the true number of victims of Russian sexual violence is likely to be ten times greater than the nearly 400 who have gone through the intrusive process of giving evidence to the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office.
That would mean some 4,000 harrowing stories – like those of Halyna, Olha, Tetiana, Liudmyla and Oleksandr.
Many of the details are too graphic to report in full.
But for SEMA Ukraine, a survivor network to which these women belong, it is vital to catalogue these horrors comprehensively.
For them, this is the ‘Russian rape machine’, a systematic attempt to crush the Ukrainian will to fight.
Yet as Donald Trump increasingly pushes for peace at any cost, they fear their voices are being lost.
Olha Cherniak was forced to listen to her teenage son being tortured
Amid talk of mineral deals, ceasefires and land swaps, what attention has been paid to the suffering of these women and men, boys and girls?
What measures will be put in place to bring the depraved perpetrators to justice?
Even more concerning, they fear a deal could be offered to Moscow that sees amnesties granted in exchange for peace.
‘When we see what’s happening politically, what should we say to survivors?’ says Alisa Kovalenko, one of the first members of SEMA – which means ‘speak out’ in Swahili – and a documentary maker who has collected these testimonies for a powerful forthcoming film called Traces.
‘What will we say to them?’ she asks. ‘For what was this for?’
The 37-year-old has little doubt that the sexual violence unleashed by the Russians is an orchestrated weapon of war.
‘It is systematic,’ she tells us in Kyiv. ‘In some cases, it is a copy and paste, the same behaviour, the same methodology.
‘It is a way of destroying what’s inside a person – any motivation they might have to rebel. When you are so traumatised, will you rebel?
‘It is breaking so many people, not just the person who survived. It’s breaking all their connections with family, with their community.
‘It’s destroying some basis of your personality, it’s about taking your dignity away.’
For Alisa herself, this is a personal mission, one that began when she herself became a survivor of Russia’s rape machine.
Halyna was ordered at gunpoint to run around naked in the winter snow before being sexually violated with a gun
When Putin’s forces first invaded and occupied parts of Ukraine back in 2014, she travelled as a filmmaker to document the war in Donetsk.
Taking a taxi back through occupied territory, she was stopped at a checkpoint where her driver – falsely – told officers his passenger was ‘with the Ukrainian army’.
Alisa was dragged out of the car, accused of being a sniper, beaten and taken to a base for pro-Russian separatists and Russian armed militants. After hours of interrogation, a Russian officer took her to an apartment and forced her to take her clothes off and take a bath under his watch.
‘After, he didn’t let me put any clothes on, so I only had a small towel. He was cleaning his gun in front of me and after that he said we would have to sleep together in case I ran away.
‘I said: “Where will I run?” I begged him, I said I would not run so I could sleep alone.
‘I almost fell asleep and then he came and he started raping me. I started to cry.
‘You feel like you’re a paralysed animal or an object because you feel absolutely empty inside. You are frozen. I didn’t feel my body at all.
‘Then, after he stopped, he said: “Nothing happened.” ’
Alisa’s partner Stephane, 46, a fellow journalist with whom she has a seven-year-old son, Theo, managed to apply pressure and she was freed after four days.
‘When I was leaving, Grom, the nickname of this Russian officer, told me I had to thank him that I was not killed,’ Alisa said.
It took five years and a meeting with the inspirational founder of SEMA, Iryna Dovhan, for her to become one of the first Ukrainians to give formal testimony of sexual assault by a Russian soldier. That was in 2020.
‘Everything started with Iryna,’ Alisa said. ‘Thanks to her, really, a revolution is happening in this field.’ Iryna was living in occupied Donetsk in 2014 when pro-Russian forces came to her house, detained, sexually assaulted and tortured her.
Then they took her into the street, put her against a lamppost, draped a Ukrainian flag over her and hung a sign over her neck that said she was killing children.
It was only when a photograph of her being beaten by bystanders went viral on social media that she left Donetsk.
Ever since, she has made it her mission to document the crimes of the Russians, forming SEMA in 2019 and working to overcome the stigma felt by the survivors.
Iryna is the central figure in Alisa’s documentary, which details her mission to encourage victims to come forward. ‘I always felt that if I stayed unhappy and broken, then my enemies had achieved what they wanted,’ Iryna says in the film.
‘It was very important for me not to let them make me unhappy. This is my weapon that I constantly shoot them in the forehead with.
‘I try to convey this to other women, that the fact that they have overcome [their ordeals] is the best slap in the face to the enemy.’
It was Iryna who helped convince Halyna, the 62-year-old widow savagely raped with a Kalashnikov near Bucha in 2022, to tell her story.
‘She could have died from her injuries,’ says Iryna. ‘She was suffering so much, alone in her cold house. She was traumatised.’
Meanwhile, Olha was the first woman to be tortured with electricity in the Kherson detention centre, where she spent almost a year held in a 3 x 3-metre cell with six other women. She could hear her teenage son’s screams from a neighbouring cell.
The mother was made to stand for hours on end and repeatedly given electric shocks. The torture was so bad she lost consciousness.
Banned from using the toilet, she would wet herself – yet another evil part of her humiliation.
Her son finally made it out from occupied territory just last month and the family was reunited after more than two years of hell.
Like all SEMA members, Tetiana, 61, whose husband was shot in front of her, refuses to let the Russians win.
‘After a while I felt, I’m Ukrainian, you bloody swine,’ she says in the film. ‘You think you raped me? If you humiliated me, you drove me to the point where I didn’t want to live any more? No way – I am not giving that to you!’
Liudmyla Mefodiivna, 77, was living alone in Myroliubivka, Kherson, when she saw a Russian soldier come to her home in 2022.
‘As soon as I opened the doors, I immediately received a blow to the face with the butt of a gun,’ she told Alisa. The blow knocked her teeth out. After they raped her, the Russian soldier threw a Kalashnikov bullet at her and said: ‘One sound and I’ll kill you with this.’
Another woman, who cannot be named, was left with hepatitis after being raped by a Russian soldier. Alisa said: ‘She was in a horrible psychological state. She was crying all the time, and all the people in her village started to not communicate with her because she was always sad and depressed.
‘After we started to help her it was amazing how she changed.
Iryna Dovhan was taken out into the street and beaten
‘Just a few months later I saw her smiling, joking and laughing – one of those moments that inspires you to continue this challenging work.’
None of these accounts is more recent than 2022, but Ukrainian soldiers returning through prisoner swaps report that the systematic abuse is still ongoing.
By some accounts, 90 per cent of detained Ukrainian male soldiers have been subjected to some kind of torture or sexual violence.
Oleksandr Gudilin, 34, was defending Mariupol when he was captured and detained in April 2022. He was finally released in December.
Speaking to the Mail, Oleksandr said: ‘At first, it all seemed relatively civil, but when I was severely beaten in the kidneys, I realised no one was going to follow the Geneva Convention.’ He was made to undress before being beaten and herded into a bath to wash.
‘You stand under a shower and they electrocute you,’ he said. ‘That’s when I really felt how well water conducts electricity. They shocked our hands, legs, backs...
‘You’re not allowed to look at the officers – but they look at you all the time. What are you supposed to do, standing there naked?’
Alisa says: ‘This is coming from a country where there are no basic human rights. That’s why I believe we have such a massive wave of crimes from Russia – and not just sexual violence. Because there are no values in this society.’
Along with her fellow women in SEMA, she believes Russia must be added to the United Nations’ ‘List of Shame’ – the roster of countries held responsible for violations including the systematic use of sexual violence.
Were that to happen, this would be a first step, giving the women some hope that the international community has not forgotten them. A letter from SEMA is currently sitting on the desk of Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
In the meantime, they will carry on documenting Russia’s crimes, no matter the political climate.
‘We just continue to do something, without knowing if it will really achieve justice,’ says Alisa.
‘Maybe it will not happen for 20 years. But we at least have to document it. I think that is the minimum that we can do.’
- Traces, by Alisa Kovalenko and Marysia Nikitiuk, will be released in autumn 2025.