KHARKIV, Ukraine—Before leaving for the front lines in 2022, Serhiy Boychuk told his wife that if captured, he didn’t want to be taken alive. A few months later the Russians took him prisoner. Guards, she said, beat and sexually assaulted her for more than two years.
She said she was raped with bottles and sticks and her private parts were attacked with a knife. He still has difficulty walking. “They wanted to break me psychologically,” said Boychuk, now 33.
Other Ukrainian former detainees described similar experiences of sexual abuse in Russian prisoner-of-war camps. Their accounts match the findings of Ukrainian prosecutors and intelligence services and United Nations investigators, who have conducted extensive interviews with former prisoners – both soldiers and civilians – during the more than four-year war.
This growing body of testimony shows that Russian sexual violence against POWs and civilian prisoners has been systematic – and condoned, even encouraged, by senior Russian officials.
male target
Sexual violence in war has long been used to subjugate and terrorize civilian populations. The most common targets in many conflicts are female civilians.
According to interviews conducted by the United Nations and The Wall Street Journal, Russian forces carried out a large number of sexual assaults against Ukrainian women as they captured towns and villages in the run-up to a full-scale invasion of Moscow launched in 2022.
But as the war turned into a slow, attritional contest, many of the known victims are male Ukrainian soldiers captured on the battlefield.
The United Nations says it has so far collected testimony in about 310 cases of alleged sexual violence by Russian forces during the war. The United Nations said the violence described included rape, gang rape, genital mutilation, electric shocks and genital beatings. The victims included 280 men, 26 women and four girls.
The Kremlin and Russia’s Federal Prison Service declined to comment. Russia has previously denied the sexual abuse allegations, saying they are baseless and politically motivated.
The extent of ongoing sexual and other abuses against civilians in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine is only partially understood, investigators have warned.
The body’s secretary-general said in a report in April that Russia had consistently denied access to the occupied territories to UN officials investigating conflict-related sexual violence. Fear of retaliation and the stigma related to sexual violence have also prevented male and female victims from reporting abuse.
“Sexual exploitation is the cheapest way to wage war,” said Ukrainian prosecutor Anna Sosonska, who has filed charges against Russian soldiers in her absence. The National Prosecutor’s Office, where Sosonska works, is overseeing about 400 cases involving alleged sexual violence against civilians by Russian soldiers. About 148 of the alleged victims were men.
“They are using sexual abuse as a weapon of war to humiliate and break the individual,” Boychuk said. After a never-ending ordeal, he was released in a prisoner exchange in October 2024.
Other former POWs and civilian detainees who spoke to the Journal said they were forced to stand, bend over or parade naked. Some received electric shock to their private parts. Some were raped – either with objects such as bottles or sticks, or by Russian guards.
Some former detainees, who were held in various locations in Russia, recalled that guards told them that they would prevent Ukrainians from having children.
Some said guards threatened to insert building foam into their anus, where it would expand and harden.
“It’s the same evidence, the same method of treatment, it all follows a pattern,” said Mykhailo Romanov, a lawyer with the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, a research and advocacy group that has collected testimony from 11 former POWs.
Such repeated patterns show that the alleged crimes were not simply the actions of individuals, but were committed as a feature of Russia’s military campaign, said David Schwendiman, a former US and international prosecutor who investigated war crimes committed in the 1990 war in Bosnia.
He said, “Under these circumstances no one in command can claim that they did not know what was happening, even if they did not order the people under their control to do so.”
Sometimes abuse is sanctioned from above. The chief prison officer in St. Petersburg told guards in charge of Ukrainian POWs that there were no prohibitions against violence, which often included sexual abuse. former prison officer Who spoke to the Journal.
Civilians in the occupied parts of Ukraine have also become victims. At a camp in Russia’s Rostov region, prosecutors alleged that Alexander Naumenko, a senior Russian National Guard officer, ordered military personnel to sexually assault 17 civilian prisoners, according to Ukrainian court documents. The investigators showed photographs of former detainees Naumenko, who he recognized.
Naumenko could not be reached for comment.
Russian POWs who spoke to the Journal said they were never given explicit instructions against sexual abuse, but said some individual officers had made their disapproval clear. In contrast, Western armies tell their soldiers that such abuse is illegal.
At the beginning of the war, 63-year-old former market stall trader Elena Tyshchenko says she was raped at gunpoint in her lounge by a Russian soldier and then brought outside and paraded naked through the street in sub-zero temperatures.
The soldier’s unit was stationed at a house about 400 yards away, Tyshchenko said. He strongly suspected that the man’s superiors knew about the abuse.
a call to putin
In the first year of the invasion, when Russian forces occupied his home city of Kherson, Oleksiy Sivak hung a Ukrainian flag on the country’s Independence Day.
The Russians put him in jail. He showed her an old Army field telephone and joked that now was the time to call then-President Joe Biden. Then, he said, they connected phone wires to his genitals and gave him electric shocks.
Ukrainian investigators say this is a form of torture widely used in the Russian prison system and that the distribution of these old phones shows collusion with senior figures. The United Nations notes that prison guards refer to it as the “call for Putin” or in earlier times the “call for Lenin”.
Sivak, who was freed before Russian forces retreated from Kherson, now runs a support group for about 200 Ukrainian men who allege torture at the hands of Russia. The 42-year-old man says he deals with his trauma by sharing his story with other victims and the public.
“At that moment, in the Russian basement, I was screaming so loud the whole world could hear,” he said. Now, he says, he wants to tell the world what happened.
The United Nations says prisoners of war and civilians have been abused in nine different camps inside Russia. Ukrainian investigators say treatment in seven of them was particularly poor.
According to former POWs, Ukrainian prosecutors and UN officials, Russian forces use sexual violence and other torture to punish, humiliate or extract information or confessions.
Former detainees told the Journal that some guards were just having fun.
Ukrainian forces have also been accused of mistreating captured Russians, although not on the same scale.
All Ukrainian former POWs interviewed by the United Nations reported torture or ill-treatment in Russian camps, and more than 70% said this included sexual abuse. Meanwhile, about half of the Russian detainees who spoke to the United Nations said Ukrainian forces had abused them in some way, with less than 5% of them saying they had experienced sexual abuse.
A Ukrainian government spokesman said that cases of sexual abuse in Ukraine are much lower than in Russia. He said these cases are being investigated and Ukraine—unlike Russia—allows international observers to visit detention centers.
The UN says that unlike Russia, Ukrainian authorities have provided its monitors access to prisoners of war and civilian detainees. According to the UN, most cases of alleged sexual abuse at Ukrainian facilities occurred before 2025
Most cases of abuse by Ukrainian forces occurred near the front lines after Russian soldiers were captured, but Russian POWs were generally treated fairly when they were in Ukrainian prison facilities, said a previous UN report and detainees interviewed by the Journal.
Write to Alistair MacDonald Alisair.Macdonald@wsj.com
