The Russian armed forces use sexual violence as a weapon of war. Against women, but also against Ukrainian men, civilians and soldiers, in the occupied territories after the attack launched on 24 February 2022. This is what emerges from the chilling stories of the survivors told to CNN, who speak of the use of electroshock in the genital areas as well as the threat of rape with glass bottles, and imposed nudity. Ukrainian prosecutor Anna Sosonska, head of the division on sexual violence in the Ukrainian conflict for the genital prosecutor’s office, also speaks of ”genital mutilation, rape, the obligation for men to witness sexual violence on other men”. But among sexual violence ”at the top of the list is the use of electroshock in the male genital area”.
”We have seen it many and many times in the occupied regions. They use the same method to commit sexual violence, the same method of humiliation, the same approach to the victims”, declares Sosonska, speaking of ”systematic and continuous use of sexual violence” by the Russian military. This is confirmed by the testimonies collected by CNN, such as that of Roman Shapovalenko, arrested on 25 August 2022 in Kherson for having called Russian soldiers ”ogres”. Subjected to sexual violence during seven months of detention in a ”punishment cell” he was also threatened with being sterilized. ”They seemed to have a form of genital fetishism. Sometimes they opened the door and said: ‘We will take out our truncheons and rape everyone here,'” the 39-year-old agricultural entrepreneur told CNN.
A 29-year-old Ukrainian intelligence officer, known as ‘Omen’, described being tortured up to three times a day, every day, for four months. And he added that officers from the Russian GRU, the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service and the FSB, Russia’s main intelligence agency, took part in the torture. ”They laughed while they tortured me. They threatened me with rape. They told me that my mother was being raped by the Chechens and twice they took me to the place where they were supposed to shoot me,” he says.
Although difficult to report, even more so by male victims, the latest UN Security Council report on conflict-related sexual violence states that 85 cases were documented in Ukraine in 2023, affecting 52 men, 31 women, one girl and a boy. Another report by UN human rights officials interviewing 60 male Ukrainian prisoners of war after their release found that 39 of them had been victims of sexual violence while in Russian detention. CNN’s testimonies were collected from Kherson, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv and Crimea.
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