Ukraine collecting evidence of sexual violence, torture to prove Russia sanctioned the acts

Warning: This story includes details of sexual violence and torture.

Daria’s voice trembled. She raced to get her words out as she relived the events of early 2022. She pressed a cigarette to her lips to try and, unsuccessfully, calm her nerves. 

But she didn’t take up any offers of stopping when she spoke with CBC News last summer. She wanted to tell the world what happened to her when she was captured by three members of the Russian forces who took over her town a few weeks after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. 

“They tortured us so much,” she said. “They did everything, even things impossible to imagine.”

Soon after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, it set its sights on the capital, Kyiv, and Russian forces began moving into surrounding towns. There, they clashed with Ukrainian forces, killed or apprehended many of the male residents and traumatized the local population. 

Daria, who is using a pseudonym because Ukrainian law protects the identities of people alleging sexual crimes, was working as a seamstress in Velyka Dymerka, northeast of Kyiv, when Russian soldiers arrived in mid-March and began going door to door, looting. They eventually arrived at her door and took her hostage, holding her in the storage room of a local grocery store.

“They just grabbed me by my hair,” she said. “When I started to resist, they tied my hands and feet.”

Daria’s is one of over 200 accounts of sexual abuses allegedly committed by Russians during the war that have begun proceeding through Ukrainian courts, according to the national prosecutor’s office.

Ukrainian authorities are now using some of those accounts to try to put together a case before the International Criminal Court (ICC) that would establish that the use of sexual violence and torture has been systematic, deliberate and, ultimately, directed by the Kremlin. 

‘I hear all their voices, all the screams’

At the time of her capture, Daria said, she was pregnant. She told her captors this, hoping they would have mercy — they didn’t. Instead, she said, they beat, tortured and raped her repeatedly. 

She said they also forced her and a dozen other hostages to use drugs. She doesn’t know what they were but says they made her heart race and feel as though she was going to die.