Psychologists who offer mental-health care to Ukrainians who’ve faced sexual violence during wartime say that Russian soldiers tended to rape women in groups to free themselves of responsibility with the desire to punish, to cause harm, and to destroy the population’s will.
Joshua Yaffa / New Yorker
In the middle of March, a psychologist named Spartak Subbota was contacted by a group assisting Ukrainian refugees who had recently arrived in Poland. Among them was a young woman in her mid-twenties who had managed to flee a village outside of Chernhiv, in Ukraine’s north, near the border with Belarus—could he speak with her? Russian forces had entered the woman’s village in the early days of the war. Soldiers shot her boyfriend and held her in a basement, where, as she told Subbota, they raped her repeatedly, in the course of several days. “She was in a difficult state,” Subbota told me. “She wasn’t sleeping. Suffering from panic attacks, unconnected from reality.”
Before the war, Subbota, who is thirty, worked with the Ukrainian police to track serial rapists and killers, and he had treated the women who survived these assaults. The woman in Poland told Subbota a story he came to hear many times in the following weeks, as more and more rape survivors were referred to him for psychological counselling. “The soldiers would tell her things like ‘You should know that the Russian Army is strong, so that you remember us and fear us,’ ” Subbota said. “They didn’t mean ‘you’ as an individual—as in you, Tanya or Olya, so to speak—but as a people, a whole nation.” Subbota knew how to treat victims who had been subject to the kind of violence that forces a horrific and cruel intimacy on its survivors, but he was less sure how to care for a person who was violated as an instrument for injuring an entire society. “In such cases, you lose your will and sense of self,” he said, “and regaining them becomes that much harder.”
In early April, the Russian Army pulled out of the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions, revealing evidence of a sustained campaign of terror in places like Bucha and Irpin. Hundreds of women and children who reportedly had been subjected to rape were evacuated from the liberated territories. According to the Times, 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.
The survivors have been offered medical and psychiatric care. At first, Subbota found himself limiting many of his therapy sessions to a half hour. “The simple reason was that I kept running into problems I had never faced before,” he told me. In one case, soldiers tied up a mother and forced her to watch the assault of her daughter. A week into Subbota’s treatment of the twenty-one year-old victim, her mother tried to kill herself. For the first time in his practice, Subbota found himself asking to take pauses so that he could consult with other colleagues who were fielding similar cases. “I wasn’t sure how to continue work so as to not make the condition of the patient even worse,” he said.
Subbota is currently seeing seven patients with wartime traumas, ranging in age from fourteen to thirty; he might only see three of them a day, with sessions stretching on for hours. But creating a safe environment for his clients has been a slow, fitful process. Not long ago, Subbota began therapy with a woman who had been held in a basement with several other women and raped repeatedly, in the course of four days, by a half-dozen Russian soldiers. Even as Subbota’s patient sought treatment for the physical injuries she suffered, she was not able to talk about what she had gone through until the fifteenth session. “We’re not so much deconstructing narratives or working through trauma but asking more elemental questions,” Subbota said. “‘What do you associate with a feeling of safety? How would you like me to address you? Are you comfortable?’”
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. “The effect of the crowd, plus the fact that many attackers had their faces covered, created an aura of anonymity, removing any sense of fear or norms, and pushing each person toward maximum barbarity,” he told me.
But even more troubling for Subbota was the sense that Russian soldiers were driven by a desire to punish, to cause harm, and to destroy the population’s will. “They simply wanted to inflict the most pain, to cause the most damage,” Subbota said. “This was not an idea or desire that appeared in the moment and they decided to fulfill in an animalistic way but, rather, a weapon, just like any other, that could be deployed on the battlefield.” He told me his months of treating victims of sexual violence have left their own traumatic imprint on him: “In my consciousness, the world has become a tougher, more violent place.”
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