By Joshua Yaffa, Illustration: Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker, The New Yorker, July 14, 2022
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 counseling. “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.
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