By Kontur and AFP | 2024-06-21

PARIS -- When invading Russian troops advanced towards Kyiv and the first explosions rang out in the suburbs, Daria Zymenko took refuge in Gavronshchyna, her parents' village near the Ukrainian capital.

The Russians took control of Gavronshchyna soon after. One day several drunk soldiers burst into the family's home, saying that Zymenko, an illustrator, must be taken in for questioning.

What happened to the young woman next forms part of what Ukrainian authorities say is widespread, systematic sexual abuse by Russian invaders.

Zymenko is one of the survivors who have overcome their fear and shame to denounce the horrors that she and countless other Ukrainian women have undergone.

On March 28, 2022, the soldiers took Zymenko to an abandoned house and told her to undress.

"I realized this would not be questioning," said Zymenko, a 33-year-old with piercing blue eyes. "It lasted for two hours."

The next day the soldiers returned, raping her again. Soon afterwards, Ukrainian forces won back control of the village.

Thousands of victims

Since Russia invaded in February 2022, Ukrainian authorities say they have documented over 300 cases of sexual violence perpetrated by Russian troops.

"The true scale of sexual violence is hard to imagine," said Oleksandra Matviichuk, director of Ukraine's Center for Civil Liberties, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.

The number of such cases runs into thousands, activists estimate, because many victims prefer to remain silent from the stigma associated with sexual violence.

"It's very painful to speak," Zymenko told AFP in Paris.

"But today I feel it's necessary to explain what I went through, because Russia continues to torture people and commit sexual crimes on a daily basis in Ukraine."

In 2023, Zymenko became a member of SEMA Ukraine, which brings together Ukrainian women who suffered from sexual and gender-based violence from Russia's invasion.

She said it was "extremely important" to speak out on behalf of those who cannot testify because they are either in Russia-occupied territory or fear stigmatization.

"I want to dismantle this taboo and prevent victims from being stigmatized."

Zymenko and several other women took part in a Paris news conference June 19 about the "mass rapes" committed by Russian forces in Ukraine.

Russia is accused of numerous war crimes in Ukraine, claims that Moscow denies.

Speaking out

About 80% of women who suffer sexual violence remain silent, Alisa Kovalenko, 36, an award-winning documentary maker, estimated.

"But the 20% who do speak out is already a revolution," Kovalenko told AFP.

She garnered international attention with her 2015 film "Alisa in Warland" about the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Kovalenko, who has a young son, is now completing her latest film, "Traces," about women who have endured sexual violence during the invasion.

She herself was sexually abused while working on "Alisa in Warland" in Donetsk province in 2014, the year Russia annexed Crimea and backed a separatist insurgency in Ukraine.

She was detained as she was leaving the province on May 15, 2014. "They were convinced I was a sniper," she said. Pro-Russian separatists held her for several days, threatening to cut off her ears and fingers.

She was also violated when a Russian officer took her to an apartment in Kramatorsk. "He forced me to take off my clothes and get into a bathtub," she said. "Then I was abused."

Despite her determination to speak out, it is hard for Kovalenko to share details. Asked if her loved ones knew about the rape, she cried. It is only recently that she has found the strength to tell them.

After the assault she plunged herself into work and signed up to fight in Ukraine following the full-scale invasion.

'Cry for help'

The taboo around sexual violence is gradually dissipating in Ukraine, say campaigners.

More women were now willing to come forward because Russia's war of aggression was continuing, Iryna Dovgan, the 62-year-old founder of SEMA Ukraine, said.

"Other women are at risk of being assaulted: this is our cry and our call for help," she said.

Originally from Donetsk province, Dovgan said she was arrested after pro-Russian separatists took up arms against Kyiv in 2014. Accused of supporting the Ukrainian army, she was also abused, she said.

Zymenko said that she had "first decided to forget this awful experience" but regularly suffered from anxiety attacks and turned to SEMA Ukraine for psychological help.

Kovalenko, who joined the organization in 2019, said she still has nightmares.

"You cannot heal after an experience like that," she said. "You can only feel better."

Reparations

A Ukrainian pilot project to compensate women raped by invading Russian soldiers could offer a roadmap for dealing with wartime sexual violence, according to Denis Mukwege, a physician, Nobel Prize winner and specialist on conflict atrocities.

Mukwege, 69, of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has dedicated his life to helping victims of some of the most horrific violence committed by military men.

Many victims feel invisible, unable to speak out against men who commit their crimes in the knowledge they will likely never be held to account.

Perpetrators must be punished but their victims should not have to wait until their attacker appears in court years -- or even decades -- later, said Mukwege.

"It is absolutely essential to be able to develop reparation programs in countries so that when women are raped and the community has not protected them, the community can at least repair what has been done," he told AFP in an interview in Los Angeles.

Ukraine is trying to do just that, he said, even as it battles Russian troops.

Kyiv is working with the Global Fund for Survivors, an NGO that Mukwege created with Nadia Murad, an Iraqi-born Yazidi human rights activist and a victim of sexual violence, with whom he shared his 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.

The Ukrainian government is hoping to compensate victims by drawing from Russian assets frozen after the country launched its invasion.

"Ukraine will be the first country in wartime to compensate 500 victims of sexual violence," Mukwege said.

"Victims cannot wait for the war to end," he added. "If they are asked to wait until the war is over, many of them may disappear... They may die of illness, of depression. They may die simply of exclusion."