A former 77 -year -old high school teacher turned out in a careful dress and hat, created a quiet revolution in the villages of the Kherson region in southern Ukraine.
Standing in front of a group of 10 women in a tent in the center of a village in the south of Ukraine last summer, she told her test three years ago under the Russian occupation.
“What I experienced,” said the woman, named Liudmyla, her vacillating voice. “I was beaten, I was raped, but I still live thanks to these people.”
From last year, Liudmyla and two other survivors, Tetyana, 61, and Alisa Kovalenko, 37, spoke during a series of village meetings to raise awareness among conflict sexual violence. The meetings were among the first efforts of survivors of sexual assault to ensure that one of the most painful aspects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine: what humanitarian prosecutors and workers say is a widespread sexual assault by Ukrainian women under Russian occupation.
Liudmyla and Tetyana asked that their family names and their village names are not published to protect their intimacy. Ms. Kovalenko has long spoken of the assault against her, which occurred in 2014 during the war with separatists supported by Russian in eastern Ukraine.
Relatively few women in Ukraine arose to report cases of rape during the conflict due to the stigma attached to sexual assault in Ukrainian society, which is deeply religious and conservative, especially in rural areas. Prosecutors have recorded more than 344 cases of sexual violence linked to conflicts in Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February 2022, including 220 women, including 16 minor women.
But the women’s groups believe that the real number comes up against the thousands, with at least one case in almost all the villages that have been occupied by Russian troops. The United Nations reports on human rights have documented dozens of crimes of sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers, but have no detailed evidence of abuse of 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 defense organizations have helped many women with health services and psychological rehabilitation in the 1,800 colonies taken from the Russian occupation, but said that not all were ready to testify to the police. Many victims remain silent and isolated, and in certain cases suicidal, according to members of Sema Ukraine, which is part of a world community covering 26 countries which help survivors of sexual violence linked to conflicts with psychological, medical, legal and financial support.
Installed in 2019 by Iryna Dovhan, itself surviving a vicious assault by armed separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Sema Ukraine encouraged 15 survivors to appear and join its community in the last six months, she brought the total message to more than 60-all survivors of sexual violence during the war, she said in an electronic message.
This month, Ms. Dovhan leads a group of Sema Ukraine to the United Nations Commission on the Statute of Women, where they will show a film featuring some of the survivors of sexual violence in Ukraine during the war. They also have an appeal, as well as a group of Ukrainian male survivors, so that Russia is appointed by the United Nations Secretary General as a party responsible for crimes of sexual violence committed in Ukraine.
Liudmyla was one of the few to have reported his assault to the Ukrainian police. Her daughter, Olha, insisted that she would signal the crime once she escaped from a territory under Russian control. “I was against that,” recalls Liudmyla in an interview, “but Olha said that the Russians had to pay. Of course, she was right to exhibit this crime.”
The attack on her as she described was particularly brutal. A soldier struck on the door of his kitchen at 10:30 pm one night in July 2022. Perfected that he broke the door, she opened him and the soldier broke her with his face with his rifle, eliminating his front teeth. He dragged her by the hair, hit her several times with her rifle in the ribs and the kidneys, and threw her on a sofa, placing her. He made cuts on his abdomen with a knife, then raped it.
“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 beaten, with four broken ribs, Liudmyla hid with a neighbor and then traveled with a family in territory held by the Ukrainian to join his daughter.
She then received a diagnosis of tuberculosis and was hospitalized for six months. “I was depressed, I couldn’t eat,” she said.
But two years after the event, she found the goal of talking to women’s groups. She said it was the community of survivors of Sema Ukraine who helped her recover.
The SEMA network was founded in 2017 by Dr. Denis Mukwege of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who spent decades working with victims of sexual violence in wartime. The network promotes solidarity within communities, bringing together women to speak and say their truths and help them defend their rights. The word sema means “expressing themselves” in Swahili.
“Thanks to this community, I started to eat,” said Liudmyla.
“I am together so that the world knows that they are attackers and despots, even civilians,” she said about the Russian forces.
Ms. Kovalenko, a filmmaker who, in 2019, became one of the first women to join Sema Ukraine, recorded numerous testimonies of women for a documentary. “It is important to speak in these village communities,” she said. “This can help reduce the level of stigma, so that people understand that they are not judged.”
Ms. Kovalenko was detained in an apartment and sexually assaulted by a Russian intelligence officer when he covered early conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014 as a filmmaker. She was one of the first women in Ukraine to speak publicly and to the rights organizations of her ordeal.
“Compared to 2019, it is a revolution that women are expressed now,” she said. “It’s a real revolution when a woman like Mefodiivna speaks, and Tetyana.” She referred to Liudmyla by her surname, Mefodiivna, in an term of respect.
Tetyana, who has a store with her husband, Volodymyr, in a village in the Kherson region, gave his 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 stores, and when it was closed, they endeavored. Then one night in April 2022, two soldiers broke into their house. They shot Volodymyr – he managed to dodge the ball and hide, she said – but they caught Tetyana as she was trying to run away. They pinned her in the courtyard, pulling her hair and beating her, then one of the men raped her. They only left when an artillery attack started in the village.
After months of advice, and stay in hospital and shelters, Tetyana said that she had thrown feelings of rage and hatred, but still could not bear the physical touch of a man, including that of her husband. She did not know if she would manage to speak at the meeting organized by Sema Ukraine.
She finally spoke, but kept a prepared script, explaining the stages of trauma that a victim of sexual assault will appear and how to help them.
The most important consideration, she said, was to reassure the victims they are safe.
In the longer term, she compared the trauma of sexual violence with obstructed sand in a hourglass. “If it is blocked, then nothing will pass,” she said.
It was clear that she was talking about experience, but she spoke to women in the audience who had also experienced the terror of the occupation. A woman said that she had been buried under rubble when her house had been hit in a shell strike, while another said that she had been forced to welcome Russian soldiers at home.
“We all have a certain level of trauma due to others after having lived in occupied communities,” said Tetyana. “You have to solve your pain so that it does not stay too long inside you.”
