>>Please note: this article includes depictions of rape, torture and sexual violence
A month before the Russians invaded Ukraine last year, Halyna Sokolovska and her husband Vasyl adopted Sasha, a 6-month-old baby who had been abandoned by his parents and left in a children’s home.
Sasha suffers from several illnesses and polio is the least severe of them, says Sokolovska, a resident of Kherson, in southern Ukraine. The couple are well-known social activists in their city, volunteering for the Ukrainian army and helping orphans.
Sokolovska, 54, was born in Russia but has lived most of her life in Ukraine. She is a mother of two grown-up children and a grandmother. She and Vasyl started helping Ukrainian soldiers with food and clothing as early as 2014, right after Russian forces took control of the Crimean Peninsula. They later became affiliated with Pravy Sektor (Right Sector), a coalition of far-right nationalist organizations that evolved during the Maydan protests.
Halyna and Vasyl supported volunteers who were fighting pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas area. On the second day of the invasion, they traveled with Sasha to the Antonov bridge, through which Russian forces had entered Kherson, in order to help evacuate the wounded. “What can you do,” she says laconically.
Sokolovska speaks almost matter-of-factly about the torture and rape she experienced under Russian occupation, while describing the months of upheaval she, her family and neighbors were subjected to from February 24, 2022, when Russia's invasion began, through November, when Russian forces retreated from the area.
During the occupation she stayed with her husband and son in their summer home, in the village of Klapaya, 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) from Kherson. She thinks that someone told the Russians that she and her husband were helping the Ukrainian army.
“They arrived the next day. Vasyl and I had an agreement: If they come, God forbid, [Sokolovska told him,] ‘you will stay behind with the child. You don’t know anything. I did everything on my own. Otherwise, they will shoot all of us,” she says, recalling those terrifying moments last September.
“It was the Russians. They called me to come out and put a sack over my head. I understood where they were taking me. It was the house where the FSB moved into on our street” – referring to members of the Russian federal security services.
Sokolovska says she was taken to a cellar, where her hands were bound behind her back. Then she was hung up from her wrists. “It wasn’t very high, but it was very unpleasant,” she says. She denied having any connection to the Ukrainian army.
“I told them we had adopted a child from Donetsk, what could I do? At first they were very civilized, but then they put a wet rag under my feet and started giving me electric shocks. I went into convulsions twice and then lost consciousness. I don’t know how long this went on; I couldn’t feel anything anymore. Then they left me.”
The following day, other soldiers arrived, urging Solokovska to “put an end to all this.” But she didn’t break. “They asked me: Why are you pretending to be stupid? I told them I was telling the truth. Ask around, people will confirm what I say.
"Then one of them said: 'Why should we even talk to her?' Two of them raped me in that cellar. Then they threw me out in the street, kicking me. But they must have told their commander, [what they’d done] because he came by later and apologized, saying they were idiots.”
Since the middle of last month, the family has been living in a village on the outskirts of Kyiv, in the central part of the country, with their four dogs.
They signed Sasha up for a program in a hospital in the capital, where he will receive developmental treatment and rehabilitation; their daughter rented a modest and neglected house for them in the village, with a large yard, to make life a bit more comfortable for them in the meantime.
But beyond the coming weeks, the family’s future is unclear. The aid they receive from the state as dislocated people barely suffices for basic needs, yet they haven’t stopped their charitable and aid work, continuing to visit Kherson and the forces on the front lines.
Sokolovska and her husband are not receiving any psychological assistance, and have to muster the energy to grapple with the horrors they’ve experienced on their own, deep within their souls.
“It all happened in September. There was no electricity or water in the village. You couldn’t take a shower. I felt disgusting,” she remembers. “Now it’s much better. My hands don’t shake when I talk about it.”
'They destroyed me'
“We have no status. We’re invisible,” says Iryna Dovhan, 61, of the abuse women are experiencing in the war. Dovhan was brutally abused in 2014, after she was captured by separatist and Russian forces in Donetsk.
“You have to be a Bandera woman” – a reference to Stepan Bandera, one of the leaders of radical Ukrainian nationalists at the time – “in order to continue loving this country, to be loyal to it and fight for it as we are all doing,” she says with a laugh.
Since 2021, Dovhan has led the SEMA Ukraine organization (aka the Ukrainian Network of Women Affected by Violence), part of an international network active in war zones called the SEMA Global Network of Victims and Survivors to End Wartime Sexual Violence. The latter was founded about five years ago, at the initiative of Congolese gynecologist and Nobel Prize laureate Dr. Denis Mukwege.
Dovhan and her partner, residents of the city of Yasynuvata in Donetsk, were affluent businesspeople until 2014. He owned a large company that did construction projects for Ukrainian Railways; she owned a beauty salon. Iryna relates with pride how they used to travel around the world, exposing themselves to new cultures.
'He kept yelling at me to raise my head. He opened his pants and took out his penis. I looked at it from below.'
In 2014, she started raising money for Ukrainian soldiers who were fighting the separatist forces that had taken over parts of the Donetsk region. She says now that she never supported former President Viktor Yanukovych, but wasn’t a political activist either, at the time. She can’t explain why residents of what is also called the Donbas part of the country chose to become either supporters of Russia or Ukrainian loyalists.
We are sitting in a house she and her partner purchased in a Kyiv suburb after they lost their home and many of their possessions in Yasynuvata. Dovhan admits she knew she was taking a risk by helping the Ukrainian army eight years ago, but she wasn’t completely aware of the ramifications of what she was doing.
At some point, an acquaintance took her tablet and handed it over to the invading Russian forces in the area; it included incriminating photos, lists of donations as well as personal and financial information.
She has described elsewhere what she went through after being detained in August and held for five days at the mercy of members of the Vostok battalion – a separatist unit commanded by Alexander Khodakovsky, who had formerly been a senior officer in Ukraine’s secret service, the SBU, before switching his allegiance.
At some point she was taken into downtown Donetsk and tied to a “shame pillar,” covered in a blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag and wearing a headband in those colors. She was forced to hold up a sign saying that she was killing children and an agent of retaliators.
This display invited passersby to assault her. The streets were largely empty, she remembers, and some passersby lowered their eyes and kept walking, but others jumped at the opportunity to beat and humiliate her.
New York Times photographer Mauricio Lima captured a moment when a woman kicked the tied-up Dovhan. The photo was published that same day and it saved her life, Dovhan says now. Foreign journalists in Donetsk who had connections to Khodakovsky helped to release her and to transfer her to an area under Ukrainian control.
The many hours she spent tied up to the post were the hardest part her captivity, she says now. Before that, after being questioned at length, she had been handed over to Ossetian mercenaries who she says were part of the Vostok battalion. They took her to a cellar.
Dovhan: “They were well equipped and armed, with big fancy pistols and knives. One of them, named Zaor [who was reportedly killed in Ukraine in 2020], handled the interrogation. They beat me in a very humiliating manner. I was on my knees with my face on the floor and they kicked my backside, shoving me so that I fell sideways. Then I knelt again and they kicked me again, taking my pants off, hitting my exposed behind with various objects.
"He kept yelling at me to raise my head. He opened his pants and took out his penis. I looked at it from below. They simply destroyed me as a living creature. He then said we would do things ‘democratically,’ [asking]: Where do you want it, in your mouth or your ass? After all, everyone wants democracy.’ Twice they made fun of me, by forcing me to jump naked, doing a Nazi salute and saying ‘Sieg Heil.’ They videotaped me. I didn’t see the clip on the internet.
During the eight years that elapsed until the 2022 Russian invasion, the issue of the sexual violence Ukrainian women were subjected to in captivity was hardly talked about, Dovhan says. Today she travels between the towns and villages that have been liberated from Russian control by local forces, persuading women to join SEMA Ukraine.
As members, they receive modest financial aid and food packages, and sometimes rehabilitative treatment, and they participate in support group meetings. Mainly, they now feel free to testify about what they went through, before Ukrainian prosecutors and international tribunals.
However, Dovhan notes, in her dealings with these abused women she often encounters a wall of fear and shame. Many of these victims suffer from Stockholm syndrome; others worry that their neighbors will find out what happened to them. There are also cases in which women are worried about upsetting their partners, who are in any case agonizing over not having been able to protect them from their assailants.
Abducted children
In recent months there have been increasing reports, some obtained by Haaretz, of massive transfers of Ukrainian children from occupied territories to Russian territory or to the Crimean Peninsula, which was annexed to Russia in 2014, in contravention of international law.
For her part, Halina Sokolovska, who has been in constant touch with children’s homes in Kherson, testified that the Dom Malyukti (“Children’s Home”) orphanage in Kherson was evacuated, with its residents being transferred to Crimea.
Since then, contact with staff there has been lost. Sokolovska’s and other people’s testimony about these cases is second- and third-hand, and Haaretz has not been able to confirm it.
But the story of Yulia Dvornichenko, who joined the SEMA Ukraine network in recent months, sheds some light on the way war in this part of the world has separated parents and children.
Dvornichenko lives in the Donetsk region in the city of Torez, whose official name was changed to Chystiakove by Ukraine. The father of her two children, Danyl and Mark, died.
She had remarried some years ago and made a decent living working with her partner as a driver, taking people from parts of the region, which was under the control of Russian-backed separatists, to Ukrainian-controlled territory, something that was then allowed by the authorities.
During the coronavirus pandemic, however, the separatist authorities closed most of the border crossings, and Dvornichenko stopped driving. For some reason, she and her partner raised suspicions and they were accused of spying for Ukraine.
One night, in March 2021, they were arrested and taken from their home. Her two children, then aged 17 and 9, remained alone in the house for a month.
Beside the beatings and torture, which she prefers not to talk about, another way in which she was pressured to confess to the false charges involved threats that her children would be handed over to the state.
“In order for a friend of mine to be made their legal guardian,” Dvornichenko explains, “I had to sign whatever they wanted me to sign. While I was at Isolation” – the name of a facility in Donetsk that served as prison after the separatists took over, with a reputation for torturing captives – “they showed me a document according to which the children were registered at two different orphanages,” she says, adding that she was transferred to another detention facility; only six months after her arrest she was able to see her children.
Last October, she was released in a prisoner exchange deal, along with 107 other women, many of them soldiers who fought against Russia since February 2022.
At the beginning of the Russian invasion, Dvornichenko’s older son Danyl, who had meanwhile turned 18, went with some friends to Russia to work as a car washer, so that he would not be recruited by the separatists. The younger son, Mark, lived with her friend, the guardian, in Torez the whole time.
After their mother’s release and return to Ukrainian-controlled territory, she faced a daunting journey in order to reunite with her children. The separatist authorities in Donetsk had decided to deprive her of parental rights and transferred the child, Mark, to the state’s care. She appealed to the government in Kyiv, thinking she would never get a reply.
“Luckily, they did answer and started to fight for my child," she says. "It was a real battle, since Russia had meanwhile annexed Donetsk, and social services there said they could do nothing. It all depended on the Russian authorities.”
After a few months, and thanks to the intervention of Iryna Varchuk – a minister responsible for the integration of formerly occupied Ukrainian territory, who appealed to the human rights commissioner in Russia, Tatyana Moskalkova – Dvornichenko’s son was returned to her.
Dvornichenko: “Moskalkova told me on the phone that everything was complicated but that I should come get my child. She guaranteed my safety. I asked her how I could trust that, knowing that my case was still open [even] after I had been released in a prisoner swap. As soon as I crossed the border, I could be taken back to where I had been. I didn’t want to go back to Isolation. She told me she didn’t know what that was.”
In the end, it was decided that the older son Danyl would go to the People’s Republic of Donetsk and pick up Mark and travel, via Russia and Europe, back to Ukraine. Despite his concerns, Danyl managed to bring his brother home.
“The day they arrived, on December 17, many missiles fell here, but they didn’t mind,” Dvornichenko says now. “They were happy and I cried a lot. I saw Mark when he was little and now he was my height, trying to pick me up. I didn’t recognize Danyl, he had matured and become serious. While he was working in Moscow, he sent money so I would get packages in jail.”
In her absence, her young son was educated in the “spirit of the Russian world,” she says. “He was seriously brainwashed. While I was still in jail and we talked by phone, I told him once: My darling, we’ll go to Ukraine and live there. He told me he wouldn’t go there. Why not, I asked, and he said that Russia was a great country that was helping us.
"I asked him if he was crazy. This ‘great country’ separated us and took our possessions; you are living among strangers, I said, while I’m in prison. He told me I didn’t understand. They are protecting and feeding us, he said. I realized there was no point in arguing with him over the phone. He had to be shown step by step.”
The ideological rift between them could have endangered their reunion, Dvornichenko adds: “Ahead of his return, with everyone taking his photos, he said he didn’t want to leave. Danyl became alarmed that he wouldn’t receive his brother. But then Mark said: But I want to see my mother, I’ll go to her. That’s what saved the situation.”
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