Evidence mounts in Ukraine that both sides are committing sexualized violence

Thirty-year-old Anna Guz was held by pro-Russian rebels for six days in May. (Guz is not her real name; she asked to be identified by a pseudonym for safety reasons.) Men in military uniforms abducted the pro-Ukrainian activist, along with her boyfriend, from her Donetsk apartment in the middle of the night. The two were held, she says, on suspicion of supporting the Maidan protest movement, which began in November 2013 and eventually ousted the Moscow-backed government—sparking the current conflict in the country’s east. More than 4,700 people have been killed already in the struggle between Ukraine and Russian-backed rebels, which has raged since June. 

A woman faces off with government troops at a January protest in Kiev. (Sasha Maksymenko)

Held in a crudely lit basement of a police building, Guz described being routinely tortured (she rolled up her sleeves to show me the two-inch-long scars of raised skin, where her flesh had been slashed with knives); she explained how she was forced to clean the rebels’ toilets and beaten on her back so severely that she could not stand up straight for two days; she said she was forced to strip off in front of her captors, who told her, “I won’t beat you up too much in the face as I haven’t had a woman in some time, and you’ll fix that for me.” After that threat, Guz was unable to sleep, terrified she would be raped by the rebels who called themselves the Russian Orthodox Army, one of the pro-Russian rebel groups fighting in eastern Ukraine for an independent state. 

(Human Rights Watch also tells Guz’s story here; Vostok SOS, a Ukrainian group that works with internally displaced people, also confirmed Guz’s detention.)

When I met Guz, in a neon-lit central Kiev café, her face was wan though made up and she wore a large pendant around her neck, a wooden oval decorated with traditional Ukrainian designs. Her voice started to waver as she told me what happened next. “They didn’t touch me that way,” she said quietly. “But they kept a woman there. And I heard them rape her. The sound is…” Guz winced and violently shook her short black hair from side to side. The woman was being held, completely naked, by the rebels in the underground infirmary, next to the room where Guz and others were. Toward the end of her detention, Guz was entrusted with feeding the other hostages. “I went in to give her food and she was on her knees … severely beaten around the head.” Guz’s eyes glazed over with tears, and she paused to collect herself. “The girl tried to hug me and I felt so sorry for her. I realized then that I was very lucky.” 

According to local NGOs and psychologists working in the region, Guz’s story is just one among many. There is mounting evidence, they say, that both separatists and forces loyal to Kiev are perpetrating rape and sexualized violence in the rebel-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine. The United Nations said in its 2015 strategic response plan for Ukraine, released earlier this month, that there are “undocumented reports of high levels of sexual violence in the conflict area, which require substantiation and medical, psychosocial, and legal redress.” 

From talking to psychologists and women’s rights activists, rape by men in uniform appears to be prevalent in the Donbass region—an area that encompasses the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk on the border of Russia in eastern Ukraine. This sexualized violence, they say, stems from a dangerous potion of lawlessness, stigma, and overall widespread violence.  

In one of Kiev’s leafy suburbs, the local offices of international NGO La Strada are deliberately hidden within an unmarked high-rise. The center, which fights violence against women, runs a national hotline and is used to dealing with cases of domestic violence and human trafficking. Suddenly, in March, calls flooded in from women in Crimea about rape, says Liza Rai, a La Strada spokeswoman. 

“We were totally unprepared,” says Rai, who counted the number of calls in the dozens. “They appeared out of nowhere. All these calls from girls and women, saying they’d been raped by men in uniform.” Rai says that the more military action a region experienced, the more sexualized violence it was suffering. Russian-backed rebels seized the Crimea peninsula in the spring. By summer, as a full Moscow-backed assault on the Donetsk and Luhansk regions were under way (provoking a counterattack by forces loyal to the Ukrainian government) La Strada was receiving calls from women in the east “who said they were raped by military men,” Rai says. “The women said they were rebels, but we can’t be sure.” 

While La Strada does not have precise figures on the numbers of reported rapes, Rai says the organization has noticed a pattern: “Women are often approached on the street, at night, and the assault often takes place in the form of gang rape.” La Strada is currently disseminating hundreds of leaflets in the former rebel stronghold of Sloviansk, liberated by the Ukrainian Army in July, warning women to avoid military men and checkpoints. 

Incidents of rape by armed and uniformed men in the east have cropped up in both Ukrainian and Russian-backed media: a pair of young women snatched from their Luhansk home after midnight by rebels who were “Russian or from the Caucasus”; women in Mariupol, the Azov Sea port city in the southeast, who reported being raped by Ukrainian forces; a woman violently raped and killed in Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region—these are just a few of the 10 or so media reports. 

Psychologist Ekaterina Shutalova, who works with those fleeing violence in the east, often meets internally displaced people who say they have been raped by rebels and men belonging to the Ukrainian armed forces or to the volunteer battalions fighting for Kiev. “These men are often very drunk—their leadership is totally unorganized,” she says. 

There are currently an estimated half million internally displaced people, or IDPs, in the country, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, part of the Norwegian Refugee Council. And they are basically left to fend for themselves. “The IDPs receive no help from the government, so imagine how hard it is trying to get assistance for those who’ve been raped,” Shutalova told me by telephone from the city of Kharkiv, where she has set up a refugee center. 

Over the past two months, Shutalova’s patients have included a woman who says she was gang-raped by armed men near her home just south of the city of Donetsk and a 16-year-old girl attacked by several men in Debaltseve, a small Donetsk town touching the Luhansk province. 

This girl, Shutalova says, “is so traumatized she can’t even leave the house.” 

The UN’s 2015 strategic plan, which is asking for $189 million of aid next year to assist 1.4 million Ukrainians, advocates for more protection and public awareness campaigns to be put into place for IDPs at risk of sexualized violence. In Ukraine, which has a track record of failing women when it comes to widespread domestic violence, rape carries enormous social stigma. The country of 45 million is home to only three women’s shelters, according to the Vienna-based Women Against Violence Europe (WAVE), meaning it provides only 2 percent of the shelter spots recommended by the Council of Europe (In 2011, Kiev signed the convention on preventing violence against women, but has yet to ratify it). 

“Even in peaceful times, we didn’t have help for rape,” says Rai.

A spokeswoman at the Ministry of Social Policy, whose remit includes violence against women, declined to comment for this story, saying that rape by men in uniform was “a war matter.” 

With few resources for women and a government-level denial that there is even a problem, documentation remains a serious challenge. 

Neither Amnesty International nor Human Rights Watch have looked into reports of rape in eastern Ukraine, according to their respective London press office and women’s rights departments. “We haven’t seen anything specific with regards to rape, but we wouldn’t rule it out,” says Krasimir Yankov, from Ukraine’s Amnesty team. “If it is happening, it wouldn’t only be on the rebel side,” he adds. 

In the meantime, Guz was released after her captors held a press conference announcing that they had swapped some hostages for insurgents held by Ukrainian forces. She now lives in Kiev, where she works as an installation artist, and does not venture back home. She says she never saw or heard about the woman beaten and raped in the next room again. 

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