For Ukraine, for their Freedom and Ours ! - NPO
Survivors and resilient
Ukrainian women testify to the rapes committed in Ukraine since 2014 by Russian soldiers.
These women created a unique network, SEMA Ukraine (supported by the Dr. Denis Mukwege Foundation), to help survivors from regions liberated from Russian occupation.
They are gathering documentation on these abuses so that all the culprits can be judged and punished.
The recordings were partially made on the occasion of the international conference “Providing Holistic Care for Survivors of Sexual Violence and Tortures - Ukraine” (Poland, November 2023).
Produced by ADDP with the collaboration of For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours
A weapon of mass destruction
« Rape is even worse than murder, because I have to live it all over again every day »
Christina Lamb
Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women
The extent and systematic nature of the rapes committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, on women, children, civilian or military men, in public or in front of their families, only began to emerge after the liberation of Butcha and the villages of the Kyiv region. Yet this was only a glimpse of the scale of the sexual crimes that came to light in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions after the Russian armies withdrew. It is easy to imagine what the civilians of Mariupol and Zaporijia oblast were subjected to. They are still being carried out today on prisoners held in Russian prisons in the annexed areas. These systematic rapes have been documented since 2014 in occupied Donbass and Crimea [1], as documented by the NGO SEMA-Ukraine, founded in 2019 by one of the survivors, Iryna Dovgan.
These acts of violence are not "normal wartime crimes". They were politically motivated: the soldiers were incited to commit them by their superiors. By helping to spread terror, they are part of the Kremlin's plan to achieve complete subjugation of Ukrainian society. As a central element in the dehumanisation of the civilian population, rape is not a "war crime". It is not only a crime against humanity, but also part of a series of crimes perpetrated for genocidal purposes [2]. This is the thrust of the speech by anthropologist Véronique Nahoum-Grappe, who spoke on behalf of For Ukraine, for their Freedom and Ours, at the international conference held in November 2023 in Leszno, Poland: "All rape is torture, all torture is rape".
It will take time for the scale of these crimes to be at least partially understood, but these acts of violence must not be silenced. For the victims and their families, they are not "the past", but an ongoing torture that invades the present. If they are to truly become "survivors", they need respect and support.
This recognition requires justice before the Ukrainian and international courts.
[1] Ketaki Zodgekar (2023), “SVAC Explainer: Wartime Sexual Violence in Ukraine, 2014-2021”, Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School
[2] Centre for Human Rights Raoul Wallenberg (2022), “An Independent Legal Analysis of the Russian Federation’s Breaches of the Genocide Convention in Ukraine and the Duty to Prevent”, p. 32