Little by little, Ukrainian women are beginning to talk about sexual aggression in war

kyiv-a 77-year-old former high school teacher resulted in an ordered hat, has been creating a quiet revolution in the villages of the Kherson region in southern Ukraine.

Standing before a group of 10 women in a tent in the center of a village in southern Ukraine last summer, he told his terrible experience three years ago under Russian occupation.

“From what I went through,” said the woman, called Liudmyla, her hesitant voice. “I was beaten, I was raped, but I’m still living, thanks to these people.”

From 2024, Liudmyla and two other survivors, Tetyana, 61, and Alisa Kalenko, 37, have spoken in a series of meetings in the village to raise awareness about sexual violence related to conflict. The meetings have been among the first efforts of the survivors of sexual aggression to carry out one of the most painful aspects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine: what the humanitarian prosecutors and workers say that it is a generalized sexual assault of Ukrainian women under Russian occupation.

Liudmyla and Tetyana asked that their surnames and names of the villages not be published to protect their privacy. Mrs. Kovalenko has talked openly about the assault against her, which occurred in 2014 during the war with separatists backed by Russian in eastern Ukraine.

Relatively few women in Ukraine have appeared to inform cases of rape during the conflict due to the stigma associated with sexual aggression in Ukrainian society, which is deeply religious and conservative, especially in rural areas. Prosecutors have registered more than 344 cases of sexual violence related to the conflict in Ukraine since the Russian Invasion began on a large scale in February 2022, 220 of them women, including 16 minor girls.

But women of women estimate that the real number is with thousands, with at least one case in almost all villages that have been occupied by Russian troops. The United Nations Human Rights reports have documented dozens of crimes of sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers, but have not detailed evidence of abuse of Ukrainian soldiers. A recent report indicated only “two cases of human rights violations against alleged collaborators committed by the Ukrainian authorities.”

Support groups and rights organizations have helped many women with health services and psychological rehabilitation in the 1,800 recaptured settlements of the Russian occupation, but said that not everyone was prepared to testify to the police. Many victims remain silent and isolated and, in some cases, suicides, according to members of Sema Ukraine, part of a global community that covers 26 countries that helps survivors of sexual violence related to conflict with psychological, medical, legal and financial support.

Established in 2019 by Mrs. Iryna Dovhan, a survivor of a vicious assault of armed separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Sema Ukraine has encouraged 15 survivors to present and join her community in the last six months, taking the total membership to more than 60, all survivors of sexual rape in war, she said in an electronic message.

This month, Mrs. Dovhan leads a group of Sema Ukraine to the UN Commission on the state of women, where they will show a film with some of the survivors of the sexual violence of Ukraine during the war. They are also presenting an appeal, together with a group of Ukrainian male survivors, so that Russia is appointed by the UN Secretary General as a party responsible for sexual violence crimes committed in Ukraine.

Liudmyla was one of the few who reported his assault on the Ukrainian police. His daughter, Olha, insisted to inform the crime once he escaped from the Russian -controlled territory. “He was against,” Liudmyla recalled in an interview, “but Olha said the Russians have to pay. Of course, he was right when exposing this crime.”

The attack against Liudmyla as described was particularly brutal. A soldier hit the door of his kitchen at 10:30 pm in July 2022. He frightened that he broke the door, she opened it and the soldier broke her on the face with her rifle butt, knocking down her front teeth. He dragged her down the hair, hit her repeatedly with her rifle butt on the ribs and kidneys, and threw her on a sofa, strict. He made cuts in his abdomen with a knife and then raped it.

“I was helpless against him,” he said. He left six hours later, saying that he would return in two days and kill her with a bullet.

Malimentado, with four broken ribs, Liudmyla hid in a neighbor’s house and then traveled with a family to the Ukrainian territory to join her daughter.

He subsequently received a diagnosis of tuberculosis and was hospitalized for six months. “I was depressed. I couldn’t eat, ”he said.

But two years after the event, he found a purpose when speaking with groups of women. She said it was the community of survivors in Sema Ukraine that helped her recover.

The Sema Network was founded in 2017 by Dr. Denis Mukwege in Congo, who has spent decades working with victims of sexual violence during the war. The network promotes solidarity within the communities, joining women to speak and tell their truths, and help them defend their rights. The word Sema means “speaking” in Swahili.

“Thanks to this community, I began to eat,” Liudmyla said.

“I stay together for the world to know that they are aggressors and despotes, even for civilians,” he said about Russian forces.

Mrs. Kovalenko, a filmmaker who became one of the first women to join Sema Ukraine in 2019, has registered many women’s testimonies for a documentary. “It is important to talk in these communities in the villages,” he said. “It can help reduce the stigma level, so that people understand that they are not being judged.”

Mrs. Kalenko was arrested in an apartment and sexually assaulted by a Russian intelligence officer when she covers the early conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014 as a filmmaker. It was one of the first women in Ukraine in speaking publicly and rights organizations about their terrible experience.

“Compared to 2019, it is a revolution that women are talking now,” he said. “It is a true revolution when a woman like Mephodiivna speaks, and Tetyana.” He referred to Liudmyla for his patronymic, Mephodiivna, in a term of respect.

Tetyana, owner of a store with her husband, Volodymyr, in a village in the Kherson region, gave her first interview with a New York Times journalist and spoke for the first time at a town meeting last summer.

The Russian soldiers who occupied their people frequently visited their store, and when they were closed, they would enter. Then, an April night, 2022, two soldiers broke into their home. They shot Volodymyr, he managed to dodge the bullet and hid, he said, but caught Tetyana as he tried to escape. They held her in the courtyard, pulling her hair and hitting her, and then one of the men raped her. They left alone when an artillery attack began in the town.

After months of advice, and stays in the hospital and shelters, Tetyana said she had ruled out feelings of anger and hate, but that she still could not bear the physical touch of a man, including her husband’s. I was not sure if I managed to speak at the meeting organized by Sema Ukraine.

Finally he spoke, but maintained a prepared script, explaining the stages of trauma that will show a victim of sexual assault and how to help them.

The most important consideration, he said, was to assure the victims who are safe.

In the long term, he compared the trauma of sexual violence with clogged sand on a sand watch. “If it is blocked, then nothing will happen,” he said.

It was clear that he was talking about experience, but he was talking to women at the audience who had also lived the terror of the occupation. A woman said she had been buried under the rubble when her house was hit in one strike, while another said she had been forced to receive Russian soldiers at home.

“We all have some indirect trauma level after living in occupied communities,” Tetyana said.

“You need to solve your pain so that it does not remain within you for too long.” Nytimes

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