Ukrainian men try to heal from Russia’s campaign of sexual violence

Warning: This story discusses sexual violence.

Oleksiy Sivak has found comfort in conversation.

Before Russia went on a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the 40-year-old spent almost half of his life working on international merchant and passenger fleets as a sailor.

For 17 years, he ventured from his sea-sprayed city of Kherson to ensure ships were in good working order. His language became how the ocean moved.

“But the invasion put an end to my work and my career,” Sivak tells Euronews.

As Moscow invaded its neighbor, hoping to blitz the country, Russian tanks and soldiers stormed the capital of the eponymous Ukrainian region in February 2022 and occupied the hub for six months.

Once in control, they set up their own facilities in hopes of creating a Donbas-style puppet Kherson People’s Republic — including a detention site meant to help quell any semblance of a rebellion.

Sivak says he was illegally detained and tortured by Russian servicemen for two of those six months. “I was subjected to physical and psychological torture, including sexual torture,” he says. Kyiv took back the city in November 2022, and Sivak was freed.

“During the liberation of Kherson our invaders fled the city,” Sivak recalls. “I was luckier than the others, as there was not enough room for me in the car in which the prisoners were transported (elsewhere) by Russians and I was simply released, without documents, but still I was able to return home.”

This was just the beginning of Sivak’s journey. “Everything started in captivity,” he says.

UN: More than half of Ukrainian sexual violence victims are male

Overwhelming evidence suggests Russia has weaponized sexual violence — such as rape, genital mutilation, forced stripping and other means of torture — against men and boys in Ukraine over the past two years. Under international law, these constitute war crimes.

The latest United Nations Security Council report into conflict-related sexual violence states the investigatory body has documented 263 cases perpetrated by Russian armed forces, law enforcement authorities and penitentiary services against civilians and prisoners of war in Ukraine since the 2022 full-scale invasion. Over half of these victims are male (163); 83 are female. 10 are underage girls, and two are boys.

An earlier report by non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch corroborates Russia has been using sexual violence against men, stating that Moscow authorities built dedicated detention facilities — used for confinement, interrogations, execution and torture — in regions such as Kherson.

A follow-up report by the UN’s human rights office, OHCHR — its main investigating body — found these crimes were usually accompanied by severe beatings, strangling, suffocating, slashing, shooting next to the head of the victim and wilful killing.

Most of these OHCHR reports include harrowing stories. In one, a Ukrainian prisoner alleged a Russian officer attempted to rape him with a PVC pipe during an interrogation. Another said Russian officials forced him to undress, applied electric shock to his testicles, and threatened to rape him with a police baton.

Over the months Sivak was imprisoned and tortured, he says the only thing that got him through the days was talking to his cellmates. They became each other’s psychologists and confidants. “Their jokes, sympathy, kind words, and even a look was our only lifeline,” he says.

‘Making the present tolerable and future happy’

Sivak estimates there are “thousands” of Ukrainian men living with the scars of Russian-inflicted sexual violence.

Meanwhile, others are still being seized in territories under Moscow’s control: another 37,000 Ukrainians, including civilian adults and children, remain unaccounted for and are likely held in Russian prisons, according to the Ukrainian ombudsman’s office.

This is why roughly a year ago, I established Alumni: an organization offering men peer-to-peer mental health support, including regular face-to-face meetups, workshops, referrals and — soon — online services. The aim is to be there for other survivors and provide a space for conversation.

But Sivak says it is important to note that Alumni does not purport to “treat” people. “We help people find a new path in their lives. Not by erasing what happened to them, but by accepting and taking into account this experience,” he says.

Alumni is meant to be a place for survivors to acknowledge what happened and learn how to live with it, Sivak explains — a massive challenge that will define the rest of their lives.

“We are doing all this for ourselves, our brothers, and especially for those who are being held captive and tortured right now,” Sivak says.

“I cannot change the past, but each of us strives to do our best to make the present tolerable and the future happy for all those who have been and are being tortured.”

Survivors are often left with manifold injuries after this type of trauma, such as physical illness and mental disorders, like post-traumatic stress disorder.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in June the impact of conflict-related sexual violence is lasting and harmful and “destroys the social fabric of communities.”

An attendee who became a peer

Oleksandr Reshetov has lived in Kherson his entire life — and loves it. The 34-year-old tells Euronews he met his first love and all of his best friends in the Ukrainian “hero city”.

Before the war, he found joy in owning a furniture store, collecting antiques and arranging flowers for his family. “This city means so much to me,” he says.

Since Russia’s war of aggression, his life has become almost unrecognizable. “My life after the war has changed so much,” he says. “The war made me appreciate what I have.”

Russian armed forces inflicted sexual violence on Reshetov. Following the trauma, I drank alcohol to numb the pain.

He attended an Alumni retreat in the city of Mykolaiv to try and break the cycle, and says he felt immediately supported. “I was treated not as a victim, but as a best friend. I felt among my own,” Reshetov says.

“Although everyone was different, we had only one thing in common: we expressed ourselves to each other.”

As a result of joining the Alumni network, Reshetov cut back on his drinking and spent more time with his family. Then, he became an Alumni mentor, wanting to help others after successfully working on himself.

“I realized that I was not the only one and there are many guys who went through the same thing as me, including the CRSV, and now we are together,” he says.

Violence employed to ’emasculate a population’

Charu Hogg is the founder and director of All Survivors Project — a body providing research on men and boys who survived sexual violence during conflict or displacement.

Since the organization was founded in 2016, Hogg and her team of researchers have spoken to survivors from Afghanistan and Colombia to the Central African Republic. But from what Hogg has seen being reported, “Ukraine is the only context in the world that has such high levels of documentation of abuse,” she tells Euronews.

The reason her organization focuses solely on male survivors — and not women, which represent 95% of UN-documented survivors of these crimes — is because they are under-researched.

“We are the only organization, the only global organization, that works on sexual violence against men and boys in the fields of access to help justice and prevention,” she says.

All Survivors Project recently started working with Alumni to begin to understand the barriers for male victims accessing health care. Over the next year, Hogg says the organization will interview Alumni members about their experiences to better understand the challenges they face while documenting cases and providing information to the national prosecution agency.

The impetus is to help the men and improve Ukraine’s official strategy in investigating these crimes.

Hogg, a former investigator for Human Rights Watch, is aware that state-sanctioned violence is harmful to individuals. It is also corrosive to the national spirit.

“For the Russian Federation to practice this with what seems like impunity appears to suggest that this is a way in which to coerce, to control, to demean, and to emasculate a population,” she says.

She is aware that interviewing these men will be difficult as Ukraine is a country at war, ravaged by strikes on its infrastructure. “This affects people’s ability to communicate because you don’t have Wi-Fi,” she says. Finding male survivors willing to speak about what happened to them is not easy either, as “these are issues that are very difficult to broach.”

The overall aim is holding Russia to account — something many international governmental bodies have been trying to do since the allegations first emerged. Two years ago, the International Criminal Court at The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Kremlin responded to these allegations, referring to them as “outrageous” and “unacceptable.” It has failed to provide proof to the contrary, however.

‘We didn’t stop talking’

Sivak says he was freed from Russian incarceration when Ukrainian soldiers took back his city.

For him, the international community plays a major role in combating conflict-related sexual violence by supporting Ukraine in its fight to defend itself, as well as levying sanctions. “To prevent such crimes, there must be appropriate punishment,” he says.

The international community can also invest in programs — such as the work championed by All Survivors Project — aiming to help survivors “rehabilitate, reintegrate and re-adapt to society,” he says.

Sivak is aware that outside of the war in Ukraine, he and his Alumni colleagues have their own battles ahead of them, combating family breakdown, social isolation and mental disorders resulting from this type of sexual trauma.

This is why Alumni continues to engage and to always talk with individuals living with the scars of this type of violence. Making them feel heard while among those who understand because they went through the same experience is the organization’s root belief.

“In English, (Alumni) means a graduate or a former student without a diploma, but at the same time it sometimes means former prisoners,” he says.

“Once when meeting with a group of former cellmates just on the street, a conversation started, and someone called our meeting a reunion… When we were released, we didn’t stop talking.”

If this story raised issues for you and you are in Europe, contact a country- and gender-specific support service to get help.