CNN
Within an hour of being arrested by Russian security forces, Roman Shapovalenko was threatened with rape.
On August 25, 2022, the day after Ukraine’s Independence Day, he said three armed, masked officers from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) stormed his home in the southern Ukrainian port city of Kherson, which was occupied by Russian forces at the time.
They turned his house inside out searching for incriminating evidence. A message in Shapovalenko’s phone that called Russian soldiers “orcs” — a derisive reference to the evil forces in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth books and a popular Ukrainian slur for the Russian army — was enough for them. He said he was tied up, blindfolded and stuffed into an unmarked car.
For days after, Shapovalenko said he was repeatedly electrocuted in his genital area, threatened with being raped with a glass bottle, and was even made to believe he could be sterilized.
“They seemed to have a fetish for genitalia. Sometimes the door would open, and they would say: ‘We’re going to take out our batons and we’re going to rape everyone here,’” the 39-year-old farm manager told CNN.
Describing the graphic detail of his experience matter-of-factly, Shapovalenko sometimes paused to laugh nervously. He said his sense of humor is helping with what he knows will be a long recovery. The Russians, he said, hated it. “I made a little joke, and they didn’t like it. I got punched for that.”
Shapovalenko’s experience of sexual violence at the hands of Russian forces is common among Ukrainians – including civilians and soldiers – who have been detained since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of the country more than two years ago.
Human rights monitors have long reported on the rampant use of sexual violence by Russian police and security forces against prisoners and detainees in Russia. Now it seems Russia is exporting the practice to occupied Ukraine.
