“The soldiers would tell her things like ‘You should know that the Russian Army is strong,” said a psychologist working with rape survivors in Ukraine. “They didn’t mean ‘you’ as an individual . . . but as a people, a whole nation.”
, dozens of rape cases have so far been investigated for possible criminal prosecution. Last month, the first trial against a Russian soldier for rape as a war crime opened in Kyiv; the defendant is accused of breaking into a family’s home in a village outside the capital, killing the father, and raping the mother in front of her child.
Subbota told me of time he spent in recent years with a serial killer from Kryvyi Rih, an industrial center in southern Ukraine, who raped and murdered multiple women. He was a pure sadist, Subbota explained, guided by his own individual impulses. But the stories that Subbota’s patients were telling him suggested an evil that he hadn’t previously encountered. The Russian soldiers tended to rape women in groups, relying on the presence of others to free themselves of responsibility or restraint.
A Ukrainian psychologist who helped set up a free hotline for victims told me that calls come in waves: “A certain area is liberated, and we get overwhelmed with cases. But then things go quiet, and you think, Thank God, maybe it’s over.” But then Russian forces pull out of villages outside of, say, Kharkiv or Kherson, and therapists know there is a renewed need for their help. “During war, everyone has their own front, and this is ours,” the psychologist said.
According to Volchenska, many victims of wartime sexual violence are experiencing overlapping traumas, and their own assault often does not register as the worst or most urgent crisis. Nearly all of her patients have lost their homes. Many have seen relatives killed. There are children to feed and schools and doctors to find while in exile. “When there is so much tragedy all around, people begin to feel shame,” Volchenska said. “That they don’t have it as bad as others. Or they are to blame.
The exchange only deepened their relationship. “She saw me as genuine,” Volchenska said. “I then told her that I knew why the decision to help was so important for her, and I respected it, even if it pained me.” These days, Volchenska told me, the woman has returned to the front, where she is once again volunteering as a combat medic.
Stetsenko found herself in the role of accidental therapist, drawing on her training from years ago. With the family settled in Vyshhorod, Stetsenko looked for pretexts to stop by and visit, bringing T-shirts for the girl or a box of eclairs. Out of a protective impulse, the girl’s mother had decided to keep the story of her daughter’s ordeal private and not seek outside help. “My most complicated relationship was with the mom,” Stetsenko said.
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