Sexual violence, torture and betrayal: Life under Putin’s occupation

Like many young people, Denis and Maria*, a couple in their early thirties from Melitopol in southeastern Ukraine, didn’t always pay much attention to the news.

So when they heard a thunderous rumble in the distance on February 24, 2022, they assumed it was just another winter storm rolling in from the Black Sea.

“Then we looked out the window, saw the chaos, and realised something was happening,” says Denis, the sound of the opening battles of Vladimir Putin’s invasion still lodged in his memory.

The occupation began the next day when Russian troops surging out of Crimea entered Melitopol and seized its city hall, police station and airport.

The couple soon joined the local resistance network, distributing pro-Ukrainian posters and sharing the coordinates of Russian positions. But within weeks they were caught disseminating propaganda and detained.

“Bastards like you belong in the trunk,” Denis remembers one of the Russians scowling at him as they forced him into the boot of a car.

At a detention centre their captors quickly found more evidence of their involvement with the underground – messages on Telegram sharing the positions of Russian checkpoints that later came under attack.

From that point Denis and Maria were separated. He was thrown into a cell with 25 other men, while she was sent off for further interrogation. Neither could have anticipated the nightmarish ordeal that was to follow.

Denis described being forced to watch while a fellow captive was raped by the guards.

“They took me to a garage and forced me to watch as a man had his head and legs held down while he was raped,” he said.

Like something out of a dystopian satire, if Denis closed his eyes or tried to avert his gaze, they would beat him severely or administer electric shocks to his feet.

“If you don't watch, this could happen to you,” a guard told him.

Denis too was sexually assaulted while in captivity. He is one of hundreds of Ukrainians to come forward and report sexual abuse by Russia’s occupying forces since the start of the war.

From Kyiv to Kherson, The Telegraph travelled across Ukraine gathering evidence on atrocities committed by Russian troops from those who lived under Russian occupation.

Their testimonies, including accounts of rape, torture and forced disappearances, reveal a pattern of systematic abuse intended to terrorise the local population into submission.

Every survivor interviewed by The Telegraph described either witnessing or being subjected to sexual violence.

Some agreed to share medical records that preserve, in forensic detail, the abuse they suffered – from broken bones to diagnoses of mental health conditions and sexually-transmitted diseases.

Their stories add to a growing body of evidence compiled by Ukrainian and international investigators implicating Russia’s forces in atrocities against civilians under occupation, including the use of rape as a weapon of war.

Denis endured 57 days in captivity, Maria 44. The full extent of the trauma they suffered while in Russian captivity only became clear after they were released and made it back to Ukrainian-held territory.

In April this year, Denis underwent specialist psychiatric evaluation and was diagnosed with PTSD and depression. His broken ribs are still yet to fully heal.

Anna, a 72-year-old widow with limited mobility, could only watch as her neighbours fled their small village in Kherson Oblast when the Russians approached.

Some didn’t even make it out.

“One day a woman tried to flee with her five children,” Anna said. “She stepped on a mine and was killed instantly. The children saw everything.”

After the occupation began, the remaining villagers were unable to bury their dead. Bodies were left in the streets, and the smell of death was everywhere.

There were about 60 of them left, but they soon ran out of food.

“They destroyed everything. They stole the animals, and the only cow we villagers had to survive – the one that provided us milk and cheese – was shot and killed,” she said.

To escape the near-constant bombings, Anna sheltered in a neighbour's basement with seven other people, but the damp made her ill.

“I went back to the shelter in my own home. I was alone with my dog. I was terrified because the Russians would come at night and threaten me,” Anna said.

On the night of June 27, 2022, a group of Russian soldiers forced their way into her home.

She was sleeping on her living room sofa but was woken by a light that appeared to be suspended in the air in the pitch-dark.

It was a Russian soldier, brandishing his rifle.

“Who was here? Who was here?” demanded the soldier, who Anna believes was under the influence of drugs.

The man’s tone grew increasingly aggressive until he finally struck her with his rifle, knocking out one of her teeth. Then he told her to take off her clothes.

“How can you tell me to take off my clothes? If someone said this to your mother, what would you think?” Anna replied.

Her protests went unheard, and he then raped her.

During the assault, the soldier’s phone rang. He answered, and the caller addressed him by his name – Roman – which Anna overheard.

Realising that his identity had been revealed, the soldier became even more violent.

“If you even think of telling anyone, I will bury you alive. And if you tell the neighbours, I’ll kill them all,” he said before leaving.

The first person to see Anna’s bruised and swollen face was her neighbour. With the soldier's threats still ringing in her ears, Anna told her she had fallen down the stairs on her way into a bomb shelter.

At the end of August 2022, Anna’s house was struck by a missile while she was still inside it.

“I didn’t know where in the basement to take shelter because I was afraid the house would collapse on top of me,” she said. “I was lucky the missile struck the chimney. If it hadn’t, it would’ve hit the basement directly, and I’d be dead.”

Two days after the strike, her village was liberated – becoming one of the first to be freed by Ukraine’s forces in a major offensive that would eventually retake all the land up to the Dnieper river.

“I heard gunfire and people running. I thought it was the Russians, but it was our own, it was the Ukrainians. They told me not to go outside because there was still street fighting. On September 2, we were all evacuated,” she said.

But the scars of the occupation are deep.

Today, Anna’s house – like much of the rest of the village – remains in ruins. Sometimes, she walks through the rooms, reliving the events that changed her life.

Some residents have left for good, like one family whose nine-year-old daughter was raped repeatedly by Russian soldiers.

“They left out of shame and from the pain of seeing the place where she was raped again and again,” Anna said.

Anna herself is still grappling with the aftershocks of what happened to her.

She contracted hepatitis C as a result of her rape, and has been taking antiviral medicine to prevent it from doing permanent damage to her liver.

A readout from a medical assessment she underwent after the village was liberated contains her diagnosis, and the doctor’s recommendations:

“Now, I am recovering,” she said.

Margarita, a 78-year-old retired literature teacher, also had to stay behind when the Russians captured her Kherson Oblast village.

In the early days, she had to share her house with five Russian soldiers who forced their way in and refused to leave.

“They were extremely violent. Sometimes they got drunk and began shooting at each other,” she said.

Eventually, the men moved on to another house, but a few months later, late at night, another Russian soldier broke in.

When she confronted him, he attacked her, beating her so badly with his gun that she lost several teeth.

He lifted her from the floor, laid her on the sofa, and began to strangle her with his bare hands.

“He squeezed my throat so hard that, for weeks after the attack, I couldn’t eat solid food because it hurt so much,” she said.

He then raped her at knifepoint, during which he cut her stomach with a blade.

“I’ll be back the day after tomorrow. If you think about telling anyone, I’ll kill you,” he told her.

“When he left, I walked out of the house and began to cry. My tears washed the blood off my face. Some neighbours saw me and asked what happened, but I was too ashamed to tell them – I said I had fallen in the basement,” she said.

Margarita endured the pain from the stomach wounds and fractured ribs for two months, afraid to go to a hospital out of fear that collaborators there might turn her over to the Russians.

After spending several months living in a friend’s house not far from her own, the former teacher managed to board a train headed for the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporiyia.

"When we arrived, we began to kiss the ground. There, the Ukrainian forces treated us very well – they gave us food and allowed us to wash ourselves. From there, I went to Kryvyi Rih, the city where my daughter was living with her children."

It was there she sought medical treatment. A doctor’s note details the damage done to her ribs during the assault. The scar on her stomach is visible today.

It’s not only Ukraine’s women who have accused Russia’s forces of sexual assault.

The United Nations Human Rights Council has reported that Ukrainian men have been targeted with sexual violence – particularly inside Russian detention facilities.

Andiy, who is 40, told The Telegraph he was sexually abused when he was imprisoned by Russian soldiers in August 2022.

He ended up in a detention centre after a neighbour – an informant – reported him to the occupying authorities for flying a Ukrainian flag.

“I knew the Russians would come for me. I estimated I had about an hour, so I deleted everything on my phone and warned my relatives,” he said.

In the end, they arrived sooner than that, stormed into his home, beat him, and dragged him to a detention centre.

The cell, built for three, held a dozen men. Almost everyone, he said, was tortured – sexually assaulted with sticks, tools, and other objects.

“They used whatever was at hand – sticks, construction tools, anything – to perpetrate sexual violence,” he said.

“One day they hung a man by his testicles. They became so swollen he could no longer wear trousers. His testicles filled with pus, and we had to drain them ourselves,” he recalled. “Many prisoners bled to death after being impaled.”

The UN has warned that sexual violence against men often goes unreported due to stigma and the “perceived emasculation” associated with such crimes.

Andiy now leads a foundation supporting male survivors of sexual violence. The organisation now helps around 500 men.

As well as providing help and support to those affected, he is also gathering evidence which he hopes will one day be useful to the International Criminal Court, in its war crimes case against Putin.

Russia still occupies about a fifth of Ukraine’s land and wants full control of four eastern and southern regions as part of any peace deal.

It is a demand Ukrainians do not accept, in part because of the atrocities they have suffered at the hands of the occupiers.

In the areas Moscow annexed in September 2022, civilians face severe restrictions.

Access to healthcare and freedom of movement are denied to anyone who refuses to accept Russian citizenship. Arbitrary detentions for even minor acts perceived as anti-Russian are commonplace.

As more and more people flee, crossing to relative safety in Ukrainian-held territory, allegations of sexual violence have continued to mount.

So far, Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General has verified at least 365 cases of conflict-related sexual assault involving 231 women and 134 men. The youngest survivor is just four years old; the oldest, 80.

Yet experts believe the true scale is far greater.

With vast areas still under Russian control and survivors often fearful to speak out, the UN’s sexual health agency (UNFPA) estimates that for every case documented there could be 10 to 20 that have gone unreported.

So far, 19 Russian soldiers have been convicted of committing acts of sexual violence on Ukrainians since the invasion began and sentenced to prison time, in absentia.

While these convictions have helped to give a degree of closure, for many victims of Russia’s occupation, the road to recovery is long.

Anna, who was sexually assaulted in her home, clings to the hope that one day her attacker will face justice.

“I speak not only for myself, I speak for all Ukrainian women who went through these experiences, to encourage them to tell their stories, so the world knows about these horrors, and so that one day the occupier who raped me will be sent to prison.”