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.
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 and asked to tick the ones he needed.
Almost every part of the body and mind was covered, but there were no urologists, doctors who treat 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 systematic sexual torture against Ukrainians, both 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 is unprecedented, she said. Sexual violence against men “happens all over the world, but the struggle is always getting documented cases”.
In Ukraine, the UN has recorded 236 incidents of sexual violence against men and two against boys in under three years.
The figures are likely to be the result of Russian forces’ systemic use of torture and Ukrainian authorities’ efforts to support survivors and collect evidence.
“I think we should credit the interviewing methods which support these disclosures,” Hogg said. Returnees “are given psychological support, and interviewed quite soon after release when trauma is high and it is relatively easier for survivors to recount their experiences”.
If Ukraine is setting an impressive example recording this form of Russian torture, it is only just beginning to grapple with its impact.
Sivak has set up Ukraine’s first support network for male survivors, in part because the first weeks after he was freed were terrifyingly lonely. Support groups, resources and medical aid were almost all aimed at women.
“One of the aims of this organisation is to make a path where one didn’t exist before, so we can be guides along it for others,” he said.
Male survivors’ ordeals are little known and rarely discussed in Ukraine, even as the country celebrates the visible sacrifice of other soldiers and survivors. Images of amputees have become common, but there are no billboards or magazine articles featuring the largely hidden injuries of sexual violence.
Few survivors are willing to talk publicly about attacks on their bodies that too often feel like assaults on their dignity and masculinity.
The sense of shame is one reason that Russia exploits sexual violence as a weapon of war, and a driving force behind Sivak’s decision to speak out. He wants the survivor network to be a beacon for those trying to recover and a voice for those still held.
“If I am silent, it’s like it never happened, and that means it is not happening now,” he said. “The reality is that many men are still in basements. If I don’t use my voice, how will those who are not free be heard?”
Other detainees are at the heart of Sivak’s activism because they were key to his survival and recovery. The men locked in the Kherson cell together were doctors, psychologists and friends to each other because they had no one else.
Their conversations picked up again after they were freed, eventually evolving into an informal support group, “the Alumni association for men of Ukraine who have been detained and tortured”.
The name came from a dark joke made by Sivak’s wife Tamara, whose empathy and practical efficiency have made her a vital support for him and other survivors.
She saw him catching up with a former cellmate and asked them: “Am I disturbing the class reunion?” So they began to call themselves “alumni”.
They considered a less flippant name for the official association, one that might be easier to explain to outsiders, but kept coming back to a sense of themselves as a group shaped by their shared experience.
“We say we are graduates without diplomas, our experience is carved on our bodies and our souls,” Sivak said.
His life as an activist began on 24 February 2022, when Russian troops swept into his home city of Kherson. Until then he had been a sailor, a “ghost of the sea”, away working contracts that usually lasted seven to nine months.
“My activism started with the full-scale invasion. Before that my goal in life was just to create a family. I never cared about politics,” he said.
He had been scheduled to fly out to start a new contract on 25 February, but instead stayed to look after his family and launch a campaign of defiance against the town’s new Russian rulers.
For six months he ran a soup kitchen for elderly residents by day, and spent nights pasting the town with Ukrainian flags, banners of the national trident spearing the double-headed Russian eagle and other anti-occupation messages.
Then he was arrested, and subjected to “interrogation” sessions that culminated in electric shocks to his genitals. “They would usually use it in the worst stages of torture, because what could be worse than this,” he said. “Just death.”
Evidence from returned prisoners suggest few are spared the worst. Two-thirds of male prisoners of war and detained medics interviewed by the UN since March 2023 had survived some form of sexual abuse in Russian prisons.
“The wide geographic spread of locations where torture was committed and the prevalence of shared patterns demonstrate that torture has been used as a common and acceptable practice by Russian authorities with a sense of impunity,” said Erik Møse, the chair of the UN’s independent international commission of inquiry on Ukraine.
In testimony to the UN human rights council in September, he also highlighted “the recurrent use of sexual violence as a form of torture in almost all these detention centres”.
Sivak believes sexual violence is so normalised in Russian jails that most Ukrainians held there are survivors, even if they might not recognise some attacks, including blows or kicks to genitals, as sexual assaults.
“Probably almost every man freed from captivity is part of our network,” he said. “They just aren’t all aware of it.”
