UN report finds Russian forces behind 'shocking pattern' of sexual violence in Ukraine
A UN report has documented over 1,000 cases of sexual violence since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began, with Russian troops responsible for 89% of cases involving victims aged 4 to 82.
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights published a report on Friday documenting more than 1,000 cases of sexual violence recorded since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. The report describes a "shocking pattern of torture, intimidation and coercion," with victims ranging in age from 4 to 82 years old.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said he was deeply alarmed by the prevalence of the documented abuses and feared they were almost certainly continuing amid ongoing violence in Ukraine. Of the 1,004 cases documented, 89% of perpetrators were Russian troops. While most recorded victims are men, particularly those held in detention, women and children have suffered most severely in occupied Ukrainian territory.
The report details crimes against Ukrainian prisoners of war and detained medical workers, including gang rape and genital mutilation. The most common single method was use of a Soviet-era military field telephone known as a "tapik" to deliver electric shocks to the genitals, recorded in 155 cases, or 27% of the total.
Individual survivor testimonies describe Ukrainian POWs assaulted with objects, a woman in Zaporizhzhia raped repeatedly over a month by a soldier who promised better treatment for her detained husband, and a woman in Kherson assaulted nightly. In the Kyiv region, two Russian soldiers broke into a family home in 2022, killed a woman's husband, then gang-raped her while threatening to shoot her in front of her four-year-old son.
Türk said sexual violence is a grave feature of the invasion that must stop immediately regardless of perpetrator, though he stressed Russia in particular must take concrete steps given the high share of cases attributed to its forces.
The report covers 24 February 2022 through the end of July 2026, drawing on confidential interviews with hundreds of victims along with court and official records. Of the 11% of cases attributed to Ukrainian forces, nearly half involved threats of sexual violence against Russian and third-country prisoners of war.
Russia was added in May 2026 to the UN Secretary-General's list of parties credibly suspected of conflict-related sexual violence. The Kremlin rejected the findings as politically motivated. Russia formally withdrew from the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture in September 2025 after its expulsion from the Council of Europe. Ukraine's foreign ministry welcomed the report, saying it again demonstrated the scale of systematic rights violations by Russia.
