Is Russia using rape as a weapon of war in Ukraine?

She was a 12-year-old schoolgirl, living quietly in a suburb of Kyiv with her parents, until her childhood ended brutally one night last March.

Viktoria Osypenko, the gynaecologist who cared for the girl for one month, is on the verge of tears as she recounts the story. She initially tells me the child’s lovely name, worthy of a tsarina.

Then Osypenko catches herself. “She did not want her name or surname to be disclosed. She did not want anyone to know why she was brought to hospital. She was ashamed.”

Osypenko decides to refer to the girl as Maria, like one of two angels, a boy and a girl, which the child made for her as a farewell gift when she joined the flow of refugees to Poland at Easter.

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Maria made the angels from blue and yellow yarn, in the Ukrainian national colours. Osypenko keeps the girl angel at her mother’s house, in memory of Maria, and attached the boy angel, Ivanko, to the mirror of her car.

Maria was evacuated on one of the last buses from Bucha, the town 30km northwest of Kyiv which has faced the worst atrocities of the war so far. “I don’t know how she survived,” Osypenko says. “Townspeople must have helped her.

“She was covered in bruises. They pulled her hair and choked her. When they were done, they threw her on the ground.”

The medical doctor was horrified when she examined the child. “Her genitalia were ruptured. She was in terrible pain. I tried to repair her organs, under general anaesthesia.

“For the first two weeks she said nothing more than hello. She cried a lot. She does not look like a developed woman. She has no breasts. No menstrual function. She is only a child, about 1.5m tall, with light brown hair, skinny, a pretty child. She is modest, shy, intelligent.”

On that night when Russian soldiers marauded through Bucha, Maria and her parents hid in the back garden with the lights out. Two soldiers wore balaclavas. A third did not. All three raped the child. Then they shot Maria’s parents dead, along with the family dog.

Maria’s psychologist heard more details of the child’s ordeal, but Osypenko was nonetheless destabilised by what she heard. “I came home every night and cried. I simply did not know how to help her. I still think about her every day. I am a Christian. I pray for her.”

The 28-year-old divorced mother of a six-year-old boy, Osypenko says her “maternal heart” could not cope with Maria’s grief. “I wanted to be a friend to her. I prepared food for her and talked to her and watched cartoons with her. She got used to my presence.”

Because Maria did not receive immediate post-rape care, she must undergo repeated blood tests over months to ensure that she did not contract certain diseases. “If she has no serious infections, such as HIV or hepatitis, which affect you for the rest of your life, she may recover physically,” Osypenko says. “Psychological recovery is more difficult.”

What should happen to the three men who raped Maria and killed her parents, I ask Osypenko. “I hope they did not make it out of Bucha alive. I hope they rot in hell.”

Some of the victims of sexual violence in Ukraine cannot speak because they are dead.

There was the woman found naked, but for a fur coat, in a cellar in Bucha. The New York Times photographed her lying face down on the ground on a blanket while police and rescue workers bustled around her corpse.

Karina Yershova’s cut and lacerated body was also found in Bucha. Her grieving stepfather, Andriy Dereko, told the Kyiv Independent he believes Russian soldiers raped 22-year-old Karina before they killed her. Several inhabitants of the area said some Russian soldiers warned them to “hide the girls”.

Paris Match magazine photographed bloodied sheets in the ransacked bedroom of a woman called Tetiana, a widowed mother of two children in Markariv, 50km west of Kyiv. “We buried her body in the garden,” the soldiers scrawled in lipstick on the mirror of Tetiana’s vanity table.

A 31-year-old woman from Malay Rohan, near Kharkiv, told Human Rights Watch (HRW) how a Russian soldier broke into the school where she, her family and other villagers were sheltering on March 13th. He singled her out of the group, took her upstairs and raped her repeatedly through the night.

In an account verified by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a woman from a small village near Kyiv said a Russian soldier shot her husband in the head, then told her: “You don’t have a husband any more. I shot him with this gun. He was a fascist.” Two soldiers then gang-raped the woman repeatedly.

Three drunken Russian soldiers raped a woman named Viktoria and her neighbour Natasha in their village near Kyiv after shooting Natasha’s husband, Viktoria told the New York Times. The soldier who assaulted Viktoria was 19 years old, the same age as her son.

Russian officials dismiss accounts of rape by Russian soldiers as Ukrainian and western propaganda. Vassily Nebenza, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, said: “The ratcheting up of accusations of Russian service personnel committing crimes of a sexual nature since the very beginning of our special military operation in Ukraine has become a favourite tactic of the Kyiv regime and our Western colleagues.” Mr Nebenza said that “no evidence” of such crimes has been provided.

It is difficult to assess the scale of sexual violence in the Ukraine war, or to determine if rape is being used as a deliberate weapon of war, as alleged by Ukrainian officials, the European Parliament, the British and Canadian foreign ministers Liz Truss and Mélanie Joly in a joint open letter, and many western media outlets.

“At this point, we don’t have a good sense of scale, and my impression is that no one does yet. We at Human Rights Watch have confirmed three cases,” says Hillary Margolis, senior women’s rights researcher at HRW.

“Obviously, that is not to say that it is not happening or that case reports are not accurate,” Margolis continues. “We just don’t have enough information to say it is happening on a widespread or systematic scale.

“Nor do we have evidence of it happening as an intentional weapon of war,” Margolis says, “which again does not mean that it is not, only that we do not have evidence of that. The cases we have documented appear to be opportunistic.”

Pramila Patten, the UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict, who visited Ukraine at the beginning of May and concluded a co-operation agreement with Ukrainian officials, denounces what she calls “the insidious myth that sexual violence in conflict is inevitable”.

In peace negotiations through history, Patten warned in an interview with the US news programme Democracy Now, “the question of amnesty for crimes of sexual violence has always been on the table... The option was women or peace. And, as usual, women get sacrificed.”

When Patten spoke to the UN Security Council about sexual violence in Ukraine in June, she demanded that there be specific provisions in any ceasefire or peace agreement to ensure that there is no amnesty for crimes of sexual violence.

Lyudmyla Denisova, who was then Ukraine’s parliamentary ombudswoman for human rights, says she received 400 reports of sexual violence by Russian soldiers in the first two weeks of April. The head of the psychological hotline which Denisova set up for sexual crimes, torture and abuse says the hotline received 1,500 calls in six weeks from April 1st until May 15th.

The rape-as-a-weapon-of-war story became the perfect metaphor for Russia’s assault on Ukraine.

The Security Service of Ukraine or SBU published what it said were conversations between Russian soldiers and their wives or girlfriends. “You go ahead, rape Ukrainian women and do not tell me anything,” one Russian woman allegedly told her partner.

“A lot of big numbers were being thrown around, by [Denisova] but also by others, without clear evidence,” says Margolis. “That is dangerous because people may come back and say, ‘This wasn’t actually happening after all.’ It feeds the myths around ‘Oh, women lie about being raped.’ Again, it’s not to say these things are not happening or that people report cases that are not true. We simply do not have clear information about those 400 cases.”

The focus on sexual violence in April and May was “not just journalists”, Margolis says. “It’s politicians. I’ve heard about politicians visiting and wanting to speak to [rape] survivors. It’s people from the prosecutor’s office. It’s international investigators. It’s NGOs. It’s everyone…There is a real appetite for these stories, which was also fed by the report of 400 cases and the constant reference to this being a weapon of war.”

Margolis is concerned that survivors of sexual violence may be retraumatised by “the race to get the story and to prosecute the cases”. The ethical question “of how that information is going to be used, whether it’s useful and the impact on the survivor and their family members” is sometimes neglected. “I worry about people being asked to go through this over and over and over.”

Pramila Patten says that in the past, rape victims have sometimes been questioned more than 15 times.

At the end of May, the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, voted to dismiss Denisova, saying she had focused too much on sexual violence and neglected other aspects of her brief, including humanitarian corridors and prisoner exchanges. Several human rights groups opposed Denisova’s dismissal.

Denisova admitted to the Ukrainian website LB.ua that she had used “cruel” or “harsh” language. In an ambiguous quote which was interpreted as an admission of guilt, she said, “Maybe I exaggerated… to achieve the goal of convincing the world to provide weapons and pressure [on Russia].” Denisova insisted that she had only repeated the testimony of victims in phone calls to her office. “It has been confirmed that there is sexual violence. Now the investigators need to prove it,” she concluded.

Some of those who had spoken out earlier declined to comment. The head of investigations at the Kyiv Independent, who conducted an in-depth study of rape in the Kyiv area, did not wish to speak to me. Neither did the mayor of Bucha, who had talked about 25 women being held as sex slaves in a basement in his town.

Oleksandra Matviichuk, the human rights lawyer who heads the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, fears that the focus on sexual violence may distract attention from other Russian war crimes. She also warns that delving into sex crimes can harm both the survivor and the investigator.

Working with regional human rights groups across Ukraine, Matviichuk has documented what she calls 13,000 “criminal episodes” involving Russian troops. These are only “the tip of the iceberg”, she says. Though her group refrains from asking about sexual violence and refers such reports to trained specialists, it has nonetheless received five complaints of rape.

The inability of the Ukrainian and international justice systems to handle such a huge number of cases is one of Matviichuk’s main concerns. “The International Criminal Court [ICC] has started an investigation here. But they will select only a few cases. Who will provide justice for thousands of others who will not be selected by the ICC?” she asks.

“In July of this year, our former prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova said she had opened 23,000 criminal proceedings [against Russian forces],” Matviichuk says. “Even Scotland Yard could not cope with such a huge number of crimes.” She advocates the creation of international hybrid tribunals on war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, in which national investigators and judges would work alongside international investigators and judges.

“It will be difficult to achieve the political will,” Matviichuk warns. “Because there is a lack of bravery to say, ‘Putin, we will prosecute you’.”

I ask Matviichuk what cases have left the deepest impression on her. “I try not to focus on my own emotion, because I will be broken,” she says. “We have testimony from a mother who told how Russian soldiers killed her daughter before her eyes. We have testimony of people who were forcibly put in a basement and Russian soldiers ordered them to choose volunteers because they wanted to shoot somebody, and they shot them.”

What Matviichuk calls “the accountability gap” is particularly wide in cases of sexual violence because evidence is often scant, victims are reluctant to come forward and the knowledge of commanders must be demonstrated – as it was in Bosnia and Rwanda – for rape cases to reach the level of an international tribunal.

“It is possible that troops are extremely undisciplined but that commanders are still aware of what they are doing and do not take action to stop it,” Margolis says.

Matviichuk says Russian prisoners are also being used as combatants, a possible explanation for the apparently high number of war crimes. Ethnic minorities recruited from outlying regions of the Russian Federation are often accused of atrocities by Ukrainian refugees from occupied areas.

Matviichuk says: “When the world was horrified by the atrocities at Bucha, what did Putin do? He gave medals to the Russian solders who served there, to encourage them to do what they want to. He showed the whole Russian army, ‘We don’t care’.”