Unveiling The Horrors: Sexual Violence As A Tool Of War In Occupied Ukraine

Within an hour of being arrested by Russian security forces, Roman Shapovalenko was threatened with rape.

On August 25, 2022, the day after Ukraine’s Independence Day, three armed, masked officers from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) stormed Shapovalenko’s home in the southern Ukrainian port city of Kherson, which was occupied by Russian forces at the time. They ransacked his house in search of incriminating evidence. A message on Shapovalenko’s phone referring to Russian soldiers as “orcs” — a derogatory term popular among Ukrainians derived from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth books — was enough to provoke them. He was tied up, blindfolded, and stuffed into an unmarked car.

For days, Shapovalenko was repeatedly electrocuted in his genital area, threatened with being raped with a glass bottle, and even made to believe he could be sterilized. “They seemed to have a fetish for genitalia. Sometimes the door would open, and they would say: ‘We’re going to take out our batons and we’re going to rape everyone here,’” the 39-year-old farm manager told CNN. 

Despite the horrifying ordeal, Shapovalenko maintained a sense of humor, which he says is helping him through what he knows will be a long recovery. “I made a little joke, and they didn’t like it. I got punched for that,” he said.

Shapovalenko’s experience of sexual violence at the hands of Russian forces is unfortunately common among Ukrainians – both civilians and soldiers – who have been detained since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago.

Human rights monitors have long reported on the rampant use of sexual violence by Russian police and security forces against prisoners and detainees. Now it seems Russia is exporting this practice to occupied Ukraine. 

Few men have spoken publicly about their ordeal, but Ukrainian prosecutors and rights groups say male victims make up a growing proportion of cases. The crimes often go unreported because of the stigma and shame associated with them. The latest United Nations Security Council annual report on conflict-related sexual violence documented 85 cases in Ukraine in 2023 – affecting 52 men, 31 women, one girl, and one boy. A separate report from UN rights officials who interviewed 60 male Ukrainian prisoners of war following their release found that 39 were victims of sexual violence while in Russian detention.

CNN interviewed four male survivors, two in person and two by phone, and obtained testimonies from two more, who were held by Russian units across five Ukrainian regions: Kherson, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, and Crimea. All described being subjected to forced nudity, genital electrocution – most often with wires from the Soviet-era military field telephone TA-57, known as “Tapik” – and threats of rape.

Their accounts matched cases documented by regional prosecutors in Kyiv, Kherson, and Kharkiv and were corroborated by witnesses held in the same detention facilities. Together, their stories illustrate what prosecutors describe as Russia’s systematic use of sexual violence in occupied areas as part of its efforts to subdue the Ukrainian people.

“We see it over and over again in different regions under occupation. They use the same method of committing sexual violence, the same method of humiliation, the same method of how they explain it to their victims,” said Anna Sosonska, a Ukrainian prosecutor and the acting chief of the conflict-related sexual violence division in Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General.

Speaking to CNN from her office in Kyiv, Sosonska said that a significant number of documented crimes of sexual violence by Russian troops, including forced nudity, genital mutilation, rape, and forced exposure to sexual violence against others, were being carried out against men. “Especially by using electric current on genitals – that is at the top of the list,” she said.

Roman Chernenko spent seven months in a “punishment cell” in the occupied city of Olenivka, in the eastern Donetsk region, after he was captured by Russian troops near Mariupol. The 29-year-old intelligence officer with the Ukrainian military – who goes by the call sign “Omen” – described being tortured up to three times a day, every day, for four months.

“Tapik is a military phone with two wires. One is connected to your balls, the other to your finger, and they just keep turning the current up,” he told CNN. “They just keep twisting it until the person tells them what they need.” Chernenko believes officers from Russia’s GRU, the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), and the FSB, Russia’s main intelligence agency, all took part in the torture.

Chernenko was released as part of a prisoner exchange in January 2024 and is still recovering. Speaking to CNN a few weeks after his release, on the day he proposed to his girlfriend, he said it was his thoughts of her and his mother that gave him strength to survive captivity. “They laughed when they tortured me … they told me that my mother was being raped by Chechens. They took me to be shot twice, they threatened me with rape,” he said.

CNN asked Russia’s Ministry of Defense, Interior Ministry, FSB, National Guard (Rosgvardia), and the military intelligence agency, known as the GRU, for comment on allegations of sexual violence at specific detention facilities, but has not received any response.

Rape and sexual violence are explicitly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions – the set of international laws that regulate the conduct of armed conflict – and can constitute a war crime. Mock executions are considered a form of torture under international law. 

According to Ukrainian prosecutors investigating conflict-based sexual violence and abuse, all available evidence indicates that it is a deliberate tactic, part of Russia’s modus operandi in Ukraine. “It’s in every region that was under occupation. Everywhere that Russian troops were located, we’re seeing cases of sexual violence and gender-based violence. The bottom line is that it looks like it is Russian policy,” Sosonska said.

As of early May, Ukraine has officially recorded 293 cases of sexual violence, although Sosonska said it is impossible to estimate the real number of crimes being committed, particularly in occupied territories which remain inaccessible to investigators and prosecutors. Some 37,000 Ukrainian citizens are unaccounted for, with thousands believed to be held in Russian detention and at risk of torture and sexual violence.

The true scale of sexual violence committed during the war may never come to light. Only a fraction of victims tend to come forward, and according to the UN, this is especially true for men, some of whom may not initially realize that what happened to them was a sexual violence crime. Some male victims of sexual violence may describe what happened to them instead as “torture.” The distinction, Sosonska explained, is important for any future court cases and war tribunals. Her office is also trying to educate the public about the fact that men can be victims of sexual violence – something Sosonska said may still not be fully understood.

Anna Mykytenko, who heads the Ukraine team at Global Rights Compliance (GRC), an international legal non-profit, said that Ukrainian witnesses and survivors of sexual violence have testified that Russian troops told them it was a “punishment.” “In several villages in the south we heard witnesses and survivors say that the Russian servicemen came in, occupied the village, and then looked specifically for the wives of Ukrainian soldiers, or their mothers or sisters,” Mykytenko told CNN.

The Ukrainian ombudsman’s office told CNN it believes that the Russian armed forces and Ministry of Defense, as well as the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service, are the Russian government bodies officially responsible for what happens inside detention facilities. However, it is Rosgvardia – a paramilitary police force deployed to keep order in occupied regions of Ukraine – and the FSB that appear to be driving the campaign of torture and sexual violence against the Ukrainian people, according to the ombudsman and Ukraine’s military intelligence service.

Since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, the FSB has opened several regional offices in occupied Ukraine to recruit agents and gather intelligence. According to an official organizational chart published on its website, the FSB has directorates in the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, in Crimea, and in the occupied portions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. Several survivors in these locations told CNN that the Russians who subjected them to sexual violence either identified themselves or were referred to by others as FSB officers.

Meanwhile, members of Rosgvardia, part of the Russian security apparatus that reports directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin, are working alongside the Russian military to detain activists, quash protests, and spread terror among the civilian population in occupied areas. The SBU, Ukraine’s security service, has managed to track down several Rosgvardia and FSB officials who it said were either the direct perpetrators or the enablers of sexual violence against people held in detention.

The SBU and the Ukrainian regional prosecutor’s office in Kherson have identified Aleksandr Naumenko, the deputy head of Rosgvardia in Russia’s Rostov region, as a suspect in more than a dozen cases. Ukrainian authorities said last May he was responsible for overseeing a detention facility in Kherson during the occupation and that he personally ordered sexual torture of several victims who were electrocuted in their genital areas.

The notice of suspicion against Naumenko, a legal document seen by CNN, alleges that his subordinates and other members of Russian armed forces acted directly on his orders when they sexually abused at least 17 victims. Two other Rosgvardia members have also been named as suspects in the same facility.

The 45-year-old was already on the US State Department’s sanctions list for alleged human rights violations, but the Russian government has not yet acted on an international warrant issued by Ukraine, which is seeking Naumenko’s arrest. Efforts to reach Naumenko for comment through his associates were unsuccessful. 

It’s not clear how and when Naumenko, or any other suspects, will be brought to justice. Sosonska said Ukraine was continuing to work on ways to prosecute those responsible for conflict-based sexual violence and abuse while pursuing accountability for the wider campaign of atrocities that continue to be uncovered.

Last July, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree on reparations for victims of sexual violence, establishing a commission to determine eligibility for compensation and support.

Sosonska and others said that while it may not be possible to make all perpetrators answer for their crimes in court, they were confident their evidence would build a case against Russia’s use of sexual violence to subdue the Ukrainian population.

The ultimate goal is to ensure that the full extent of the crimes is understood. “Even if we can’t bring everyone to trial, we will be able to show the world that it was a planned, systemic policy of Russia’s to use sexual violence,” she said.