Kherson region, Ukraine CNN —
Day after day, from city to city, a police officer and a prosecutor go door to door in Ukraine’s Kherson region.
On muddy roads, past houses damaged by artillery attacks, they search for those left behind. The two men form a special unit that has traveled from the capital Kyiv.
A mother and her daughter come to their farm. “We are looking for sex crimes,” says prosecutor Oleksandr Kleshchenko.
Until the beginning of October, this area of the country was occupied by Russian troops. Burnt out cars lie in the fields. The letter “Z” – a symbol of the Russian Armed Forces – marks the walls.
The scars of war run deep here. Russia has used sexual violence as a “weapon of war” — a deliberate “military strategy” — in its conquest of Ukraine, United Nations investigators said. They have even passed on claims about Russian soldiers carrying Viagra.
Russian authorities have denied allegations of war crimes in Ukraine.
In two weeks of work in the Kherson region, the Kyiv team documented six allegations of sexual assault. The actual number is almost certainly much higher, they say.
Tatiana, 56, says she is one of the victims. CNN is withholding her last name and that of her village to protect her identity.
She walks over broken glass and leads us to her brother’s house, where she says two Russian soldiers broke in through her door on August 26th.
“They walked around these rooms,” she says. “One stayed there and the other one who raped me came in here. He walked in, walked around the room a bit, and right here in that place, he started groping me.”
“I told him, ‘No, no, I’m not of the age to give you anything, look for younger girls.'”
He nailed her to the closet, she says, and tore at her clothes. “I cried and begged him to stop, but to no avail,” she says. “The only thought I had was to stay alive.”
He warned her not to tell anyone, she recalls. “I didn’t tell my husband right away,” she says through tears. “But I told my cousin and my husband overheard. He said, ‘You should have told me the truth, but you were silent.’”
“I was very ashamed,” she says. “I wish he and all his relatives were dead.”
She spent three days at home, dazed, too embarrassed to go outside. Then, in an extraordinary act of bravery, she says she confronted the Russian soldier’s commander.
“His commander has found the head of his unit. He came to me and said to me: ‘I punished him severely, I broke his jaw, but the most severe punishment is yet to come.’ Like shooting. The commander asked me: ‘Do you mind?’ I said, ‘I don’t mind, I wish they were all shot.’”
Although prosecutor Kleshchenko and police officer Oleksandr Svidro are specifically looking for evidence of sex crimes, they are confronted with the horrors of the occupation everywhere.
In these liberated villages almost every building has been damaged by the war. Many houses were reduced to rubble and ashes.
At their first stop of the day CNN accompanied investigators, in Bila Krynytsya, a crowd waiting for food distribution surrounded the prosecutor.
The village lay behind Russian lines but was never directly occupied. Those gathered scream that they have been abandoned for months with no help from Russia or Ukraine.
“Have you reported [the damage] the prosecutor asks. “Who would we report this to?” replies a man in the crowd.
A man in the crowd tells investigators that he was held by Russian soldiers and subjected to a mock execution. It’s hard to hear, such stories of torture are commonplace here, but that’s not the subject of her work today.
Despite the dissatisfaction of these villagers, Ukraine’s counter-offensive in that part of the country has raised public hopes that victory might actually be possible — or that Kyiv might at least liberate key Russian-held cities like Kherson.
Slowly beginning at the end of the summer and then on a large scale in early October, Ukrainian forces have reclaimed hundreds of square miles of territory Russia had held since the early days of its all-out invasion.
A short drive through the shell-strewn streets of Tverdomedove, a mother and daughter tell Kleshchenko they’d never heard of sex crimes in their one-street village.
Her neighbor, 71-year-old Vera Lapushnyak, is sobbing uncontrollably. The Russians were nice when they arrived, she says.
“They said they came to protect us,” she recalls. “But by whom, why – we didn’t know.”
She was widowed more than 30 years ago – her husband died in a motorcycle accident – and her son joined the military shortly after the February 24 Russian invasion.
Months later, after the Ukrainian military liberated her village in a lightning-fast counteroffensive, she returned. Shelling had reduced her roof to the rafters.
“I don’t know where to sleep now,” she says through tears. “There are no windows or doors. I sleep like a bum.”
She shows us inside. The ceiling of her bedroom has collapsed completely. She moved her bed to the only room that still has an intact window.
“I don’t know where to put it so that[the ceiling]doesn’t fall on my head,” she says. “If it would fall and kill me, that would be better so I won’t suffer. But I want to see my son again.”
As the sun sets at the end of a long day, the two-man team arrives in Novovoznesens’ke, a village where they have uncovered two other cases of rape, allegedly by Russian soldiers. The next day they return to Kyiv to present their findings.
Of course, many of these allegations will be impossible to prove; Many don’t even have a suspect. For now, the team is filing its reports and its investigators are continuing their work in hopes of bringing charges in the future.
The United Nations has said it is investigating cases of “sexual and gender-based violence” against people aged 4 to 82 in Ukraine. According to the UN, 43 criminal proceedings had been initiated by September.
Police officer Svidro says most cases of sexual violence go unreported.
The work takes its toll. “It’s psychologically difficult,” he says. “You understand that everyone is desperate. But this is important work.”