UN Documents Over 1,000 Cases of Sexual Violence by Russian Troops in Ukraine

A newly published report from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has detailed what it describes as a shocking pattern of sexual violence, torture, intimidation, and coercion committed by Russian troops in Ukraine. Released on Friday, the document covers the period from the start of Russia's full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, through the end of July 2026, drawing on confidential interviews with hundreds of survivors, official records, and court documents.

According to the 20-page UN report, monitors have recorded more than 1,000 cases of conflict-related sexual violence. Victims range in age from 4 to 82 years old. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk expressed deep alarm over the findings, stating that he fears these acts are almost certainly continuing amid ongoing hostilities.

The report attributes the vast majority of these documented abuses to Russian military personnel, who account for 89 percent of the 1,004 cases examined. While women and children have been most severely affected in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, the majority of documented male victims were recorded among individuals held in places of detention.

Crimes documented against Ukrainian prisoners of war and detained medical workers include gang rape, genital mutilation, and severe sexual humiliation. The single most common method recorded in the report involved the use of a Soviet-era military field telephone, known as a 'tapik,' to administer electric shocks to the genitals. This specific form of abuse occurred in at least 155 cases, or 27 percent of the total, according to the findings.

Individual survivor testimonies gathered by the UN highlight the severe nature of the abuses. These include instances where Ukrainian prisoners of war were sexually assaulted using objects such as batons, cell door keys, and shovel handles. In occupied regions, investigators documented civilian cases, including a woman in Zaporizhzhia who was reportedly raped repeatedly by a Russian soldier promising better treatment for her detained husband, and a Kyiv-region incident where two Russian soldiers broke into a family home, killed a woman's husband, and gang-raped her while threatening her four-year-old son.

Türk emphasized that sexual violence forms a grave component of the armed attack against Ukraine and must cease immediately. He called upon the Russian Federation to take concrete, discernible steps to protect civilians and prisoners of war from torture and sexual violence.

While the report focuses primarily on Russian forces, it also attributes 11 percent of documented cases to Ukrainian forces. Nearly half of the incidents involving Ukrainian personnel included threats of sexual violence directed against Russian prisoners of war and detainees from third countries. Other Ukrainian-attributed cases included forced nudity, beatings and electric shocks to the genitals, sexually degrading treatment, and two recorded instances each of sexual assault and attempted rape.

The release of the report follows the addition of Russia in May to the UN Secretary-General's list of countries credibly suspected of committing sexual violence in conflict, joining repeat offenders such as Sudan, Somalia, and Haiti. The Kremlin has previously rejected these findings, characterizing them as politically motivated.

In response to the broader context of human rights abuses, the UN Human Rights Council's Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine has separately documented widespread torture by Russian authorities against Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war both in occupied territories and inside Russia. The report notes that Russia formally withdrew from the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture in September 2025, following its expulsion from the Council of Europe, thereby ending visits by European monitors to Russian detention facilities. However, Russia remains a formal party to the UN Convention Against Torture.

The Ukrainian foreign ministry welcomed the UN findings, stating that the report once again demonstrates the scale of systematic human rights violations committed by the Russian Federation. Under international law, rape and sexual violence in conflict were codified decades ago as war crimes and crimes against humanity, notably under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and through rulings by international tribunals in the 1990s.