Ukrainian women tell their stories of sexual violence by Russian soldiers

Hundreds of Ukrainian women and girls have reported sexual violence by Russian troops during the nearly four years of full-scale war in Ukraine, according to Ukrainian authorities and aid groups. The actual number of victims, advocates say, is most likely far higher.

Some of the women say they have been impregnated by Russian soldiers and live with children who will forever remind them of their attackers. Others have told of being forced to serve as sex slaves for entire companies of Russian troops. Still others say their life became a waking nightmare after they were incapacitated and raped by Russian forces.

The New York Times spoke with more than a dozen women who said they had been sexually abused by Russian troops. Most of the women asked that their full identities be withheld to protect their privacy. Although details of their claims could not be independently verified, the Times reviewed criminal complaints and medical records related to many of their cases, and spoke with advocates familiar with the women’s accounts.

The Kremlin has said that many reports by Ukrainian women of sexual violence were groundless. It did not respond to a request for comment.

For Ukraine, the sexual violence is a largely hidden trauma. Advocates say many women are reluctant to file cases because they want to avoid stigma and painful memories, or because they live in territory that remains occupied by Russia and have little hope of legal redress.

Some women have broken the cycle of silence, helped by survivor groups, or motivated to shed light on what they call atrocities that Russia has used as a weapon of war.

Here are some of their stories -

Lesya: ‘I thought that was it for me.’

On March 7, 2022, two weeks into Russia’s invasion, Lesya, a 53-year-old economist, and her husband, Sasha, heard a knock on their door, in a village near Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. Two Russian soldiers burst in, she said.

One of them caught her and dragged her into a neighbor’s house, she recalled. “He raped me straight away,” Lesya said. “The second one shot my husband in the stomach and leg while I was being raped.”

Four other Russian soldiers approached the house where she was being violated, she said. “I thought that was it for me — they had knives, rifles and grenades,” Lesya recalled. But the soldiers stopped her attacker and pulled him away, she said.

She then searched for her husband, she said. She found him bleeding on the floor of another house. Neighbors were attempting first aid.

Lesya begged the Russian troops to allow her to drive her husband to the hospital, she said, but they would not let her get in her car.

Sasha died in Lesya’s arms two days after he was shot, she said. One of his last utterances was “Thank God my father didn’t live to see this,” Lesya recalled, devastated at the memory.

A doctor who investigated her husband’s death confirmed that he had died from gunshots to the abdomen during the Russian occupation. Lesya filed a complaint with the prosecutor general’s office accusing the Russian forces of rape, and criminal proceedings have begun.

Her husband’s death, she said, was worse than the rape.

She still lives in their house. Her car was stolen, then returned after Ukrainian soldiers pushed the Russian army out of the Kyiv region. It had been marked with a “V,” a symbol Russia has used in the war. She has not driven it since.

Svitlana: ‘I wanted to get an abortion.’

Svitlana, 31, was already worried about her 4-week-old son, who had been born in fragile health and had lost access to medical care after the Russian army invaded her village in southern Ukraine. Then, Russian soldiers stormed her home and threatened to kidnap the boy and take him to Russia, she said.

She intervened and they relented, she said. But even after that frightening encounter in March 2022, her partner, the baby’s father, began to befriend the troops. The father, a Russian sympathizer, invited them frequently into their home and drank with them, she said.

One day, as the men gathered, her partner forced her into a white van with two soldiers, she said. The soldiers put a mask over her face, she said, and drove her to a nearby village. Svitlana’s partner stayed in the van while one of the soldiers forced her into a shop and raped her twice, she said.

The soldiers “had a grenade, a knife and a rifle,” she recalled.

Afterward, Svitlana’s partner accompanied her back to their house without saying a word, she said.

Six months later, Svitlana fled to another village with her baby and four other children from previous relationships. She and her partner had split up. But Svitlana soon noticed that her stomach was growing. A pregnancy test came back positive.

“I wanted to get an abortion,” she recalled. “I went to the hospital, but they said it was too late. I was 23 weeks pregnant.”

Svitlana’s baby boy, Yaroslav, was born on March 8, 2023.

The regional prosecutor’s office said it was investigating the case and that it had received a report from a gynecologist who treated Svitlana.

The child looks like the rapist, she said. She is seeing psychologists to help her come to terms with her situation.

Today, “Yaroslav is developing faster than my other children. He already speaks fluently,” Svitlana said. “Sometimes, I regret that I wanted the abortion. I love him almost like the others.”

Tetiana: ‘It was the worst of all the prisons.’

When Russian troops occupied the city of Berdyansk in southeastern Ukraine on the night of Feb. 26, 2022, Tetiana Tipakova decided to resist.

Tipakova, 53, a former student leader and an entrepreneur, wrapped herself in a Ukrainian flag and organized anti-Russian protests. She delivered speeches in front of City Hall and recorded videos for social media.

Less than a month later, Tipakova said, Russian troops grabbed her inside her home. Eight armed men in balaclavas handcuffed her, put a bag over her head and drove her to a prison colony, she said.

“I knew that place — it was the worst of all the prisons” in Berdyansk, she said.

There, she was tortured for seven days, she said. On the fourth day, she said, she was driven to grounds outside the prison where guards had set up a mock execution by firing squad.

While detained, Tipakova was subjected to psychologically and physically abusive interrogations, as well as beatings and electric shocks. After “the electric current ran through my body,” she said, she started “constantly smelling burning hair.”

She said she was sexually assaulted by prison guards who violated her with their hands and with objects such as firearms.

The goal of the torture, she said, was to break her mentally and to silence her, as well as to force her to spread Russian propaganda in Berdyansk.

The abuse continued, she said, until she agreed to film a social media video acknowledging that anti-Russian protests were a mistake. She was released and then fled to the city of Zaporizhzhia, where she now leads a charity that aids internally displaced persons.

Tipakova’s story has become well known in Ukraine, where it was shared widely on social media. She was invited to testify in The Hague about human rights abuses in Russian-occupied territories. She regularly speaks at international conferences and works with a Ukrainian organization that gathers the stories of wartime rape survivors. She said she hoped to shed light on Russian war crimes and bring perpetrators to justice.

Maria: ‘Two soldiers raped me.’

Maria, a lawyer, often provided legal aid for Ukrainians living in territories occupied by Russia after an initial invasion in 2014. When the full-scale war began in 2022 and Russian troops took over her town in the southern Kherson region, Maria was accused under Russian law of being “a threat to the security of the Russian Federation,” she said.

Maria, who asked to be identified by a nickname in this article, said she was violently arrested in January 2023 by a group of masked men and was told she would be expelled from the region.

She and a male detainee were driven to the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region, she said. On the way, she said, she overheard a radio conversation in which one soldier said to another: “You can take the man; he’ll dig trenches and chop wood for you. As for the woman, do whatever you want with her.”

Maria, 50, said she was shoved into a small farmhouse full of Russian soldiers. There, she was forced to serve “as a slave,” she said, submitting to servicemen before they were sent into a fierce battle that was likely to be their last.

That day, “they got drunk, beat me, and two soldiers raped me,” she said.

A Russian major arrived the next morning, Maria said, and found her injured and soiled, lying motionless on the floor. He told her that word of a woman’s presence near the front line had spread.

The only way to escape, the major told her, was to cross by foot to the Ukrainian side. “The officer had told me, ‘If you make it, light a candle for me. No one’s made it so far,’” she recalled.

Maria walked through minefields, crawled through the ruins of a destroyed bridge and reached a Ukrainian checkpoint late at night.

“When I saw the first checkpoint, I dropped to my knees,” she said. “I hugged the soldiers and cried.”

Iryna Dovgan, the director of SEMA Ukraine, a group that aids victims of wartime rape, confirmed that Maria had provided testimony to the prosecutor general’s office accusing Russian forces of rape, and that criminal proceedings had been initiated.

Because of her injuries, Maria could not walk for several weeks, she said. She was also emotionally drained. She recently joined a support group for survivors of sexual violence. She spent weeks inside her house, she said, until one of the group’s members pulled her out. “I had completely shut down,” she said.