Breaking the taboo Ukrainian men facing systemic sexual torture

Russian troops tortured Oleksii Sivak for weeks, applying electric shocks to his genitals in a freezing basement in his home city of Kherson in punishment for resisting their rule.

- Emma Graham-Harrison Artem Mazhulin Kyiv

When Ukrainian troops freed the city in the autumn of 2022, Sivak was presented with a long list of medical specialists who could help his recovery, but there were no urologists who treated male urinary and reproductive organs.

"I asked them: 'Am I meant to see a gynaecologist?' I was shocked," he said. "We've had a war since 2014 [when Russian proxy forces occupied Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine] and no one had even thought about male victims of sexual violence."

It was Sivak's first encounter with a dangerous silence, born of stigma and taboo, about the injuries his Russian jailers had inflicted. It was also his first step toward becoming an activist for a group that has been all but invisible, even as their numbers mount with disturbing speed.

The UN commissioner for human rights has documented hundreds of cases of sexual violence perpetrated by Russian troops since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Two-thirds of the victims are men and boys who were tortured in Russian jails.

Russia deploys systemic sexual torture against Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war in "almost all" detention centres where they are held, the UN found. That includes "rape, attempted rape, threats of rape and castration, beatings or the administration of electric shocks to genitals, repeated forced nudity and sexualised humiliation".

"The numbers in Ukraine are quite startling," said Charu Lata Hogg, the executive director of the All Survivors Project, which supports men and boys who have endured sexual violence.

The organisation keeps a global database of cases that stretches back three decades, and the scale of new abuse recorded in Ukraine was unprecedented, Hogg said. Sexual violence against men "happens all over the world, but the struggle is always getting documented cases".