On her eighth or ninth day in Russian detention, Olha, a 26-year-old Ukrainian, was tied to a table, naked to the waist.

For 15 minutes, her interrogator levelled obscenities at her, then threw a jacket over her and let seven other men into the room. “It was to frighten,” she remembered.

“I did not know what would come next.” Sitting in Olha’s cramped kitchen weeks later in Kherson, in southern Ukraine, Anna Sosonska, an investigator with the prosecutor general’s office, listened to her recount the ordeal — an account of forced nudity that, prosecutors say, added to an accumulation of evidence that Russian forces had used sexual crimes as a weapon of war in the places they once ruled.

“We are finding this problem of sexual violence in every place that Russia occupied,” said Sosonska, 33.

“Every place: Kyiv region, Chernihiv region, Kharkiv region, Donetsk region and also here in Kherson region.”

After months of bureaucratic and political delays, Ukrainian officials are gathering pace in documenting sexual crimes, which are prevalent and devastating in times of war but often remain hidden under layers of shame, stigma and fear.

“We found all types of cases of war crimes: rape, forced nudity, sexual torture” inflicted on men, women and children, Sosonska said.

A pattern to the crimes is emerging, she added. “Now we see there is a line of war crimes in the Russian Army and among Russian commanders.”

Russian officials have repeatedly denied accusations of human rights abuses, despite widespread evidence and accounts collected by Ukrainian and international investigators.

A spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry, Maria Zakharova, recently dismissed a report by the UN Human Rights Commission as unsubstantiated testimonies and no more than “rumours and gossip”.

After investigating some areas Russia retreated from, an independent international commission reported to the United Nations in October that “an array of war crimes committed in Ukraine” included cases of sexual violence against women and girls.

Victims ranged from older than 80 to as young as a 4-year-old girl forced to perform oral sex on a soldier, which is rape, the report said.

It detailed more than a dozen cases involving gang rapes, family members forced to watch a relative being sexually assaulted and sexual violence against detainees.

Iryna Didenko, who leads the prosecutor’s department investigating such crimes, has already opened 154 cases of conflict-related sexual violence. The real number, she said, is “much, much more”.

In one formerly occupied village in the Kyiv region, psychologists found one in nine women had experienced sexual violence, she said. Hundreds of people suffered sexual violence and torture in Russian detention, she added.

The trauma is raw and inhibiting. Viktoriya, a 42-yearold woman in the Kyiv region, shakes when she describes how, in early March, Russian soldiers shot dead her neighbour and then hauled her and her neighbour’s wife off to be raped.

“The fear still remains,” she said. “Sometimes when the electricity is out, I am seized by fear and I feel they could come back.”

Viktoriya was one of the few survivors willing to talk publicly. She asked that only her first name be used and that her face not be photographed, as did several other women, for fear of reprisals by Russian forces. But the stigma and judgment of neighbours and acquaintances were also an abiding pain, she said.

“They are gossiping about me, and I mostly stay at home,” she said.

The grief was such that her neighbour Nataliia, who was also raped and whose husband was killed, was given refuge abroad. Her 15-year-old son was suicidal in the weeks after the attack, said Didenko.

A psychologist and lawyer, Didenko met Nataliia when she visited their village after Russian troops withdrew. Before the war, her department had handled domestic violence crimes, and she knew well the difficulties women faced in reporting crimes, she said.

Much of that has to do with the stigma of rape in a conservative religious society, but there is also a deep-seated distrust of the authorities in a post-Soviet system that has rarely focused on victims’ needs and often blamed them instead.

“From our experience with domestic violence, we realised victims do not talk about it in principle,” Didenko said.

New York Times News Service