The UN human rights office published a report on Friday documenting 1,004 verified cases of conflict-related sexual violence in Ukraine between February 2022 and July 2026, attributing 89 percent of them to Russian forces and 11 percent to Ukrainian ones. Investigators recorded gang rape, genital mutilation and the use of electric shocks on men’s genitals in Russian detention, and threats of sexual violence and beatings to the genitals in facilities run by Ukraine.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights built the figures from interviews with survivors of abuse committed by both sides. The count covers the period from Russia’s full-scale invasion through July of this year.
Most of the survivors are men
The most striking finding in the report cuts against what most people assume about wartime sexual violence. In detention settings, the majority of victims were men, particularly prisoners of war and civilian detainees. Women and children were also affected, mostly in Russian-occupied areas rather than in captivity.
Danielle Bell, who heads the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, said the public understanding of the problem does not match what her team found. She noted that in the Ukraine context, most survivors are men, and that men and women need different approaches to recovery.
That distinction matters for anyone designing support services. Medical care, legal aid and psychological treatment built around female survivors will miss the group that makes up the bulk of documented cases here.
What happened in Russian custody
Russian authorities inflicted sexual violence on Ukrainian prisoners of war and detained civilians at every stage of captivity, according to the report. That covers the moment of capture, transfer between facilities, interrogation and the length of detention itself. The pattern appeared both in occupied parts of Ukraine and inside Russia.
Documented violations include rape, gang rape and genital mutilation. Interrogators also applied electric shocks to men’s genitals using a Soviet-era military field telephone that detainees call a “tapik,” a device that generates current when its handle is cranked.
Investigators concluded that Russia took no steps to prevent these acts, investigate them or prosecute the personnel responsible. The Russian government also ignored requests for information from OHCHR. Its permanent mission in Geneva declined to comment on the findings.
Ukraine’s record
Nearly half of the violations attributed to Ukrainian authorities involved threats of sexual violence and beatings to the genitals, directed at Russian and third-country prisoners of war and detainees. OHCHR documented no cases of rape of Russian prisoners by Ukrainian forces.
The geography of those reports is worth noting. Prisoners described abuse in 10 official detention facilities and 55 unofficial or transit locations. The unofficial sites outnumber the formal ones by more than five to one, which points to a monitoring gap in exactly the places where oversight is weakest.
OHCHR credited the Ukrainian government with taking some preventive measures and with cooperating with its requests for information. Accountability, the office said, remains limited. Cooperation is not the same as prosecution.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry welcomed the report in a statement, saying it showed the scale of violations committed by Russia and the steps Kyiv has taken to prevent such violence and compensate victims. The statement said nothing directly about the incidents involving Ukrainian forces.
The numbers are almost certainly too low
The report warns against reading 1,004 as a total. Conflict-related sexual violence goes badly under-reported in every war, and the conditions in this one make the gap wider than usual.
Russia has refused to give OHCHR access to occupied Ukrainian territory, to prisoners of war and to civilian detainees. Investigators could not enter the facilities where they believe most of the abuse occurred. Everything documented in Russian custody comes from people who got out and agreed to describe what happened to them.
Survivors also face reasons not to speak. Shame, fear of reprisal against family still in occupied areas, and the near-total absence of services for male survivors all suppress reporting. Some detainees remain in captivity and cannot report anything at all.
Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said he is deeply alarmed by how common these acts appear in the documented record. He added that he fears they are almost certainly continuing while the fighting goes on.
What happens next
Three things will determine whether this report changes anything.
Access is the first. OHCHR cannot verify what it cannot see, and Russia has blocked entry to occupied territory and detention sites since 2022. Without that access, every future report will carry the same caveat and the same undercount. Any prisoner exchange or ceasefire arrangement that includes independent monitoring of detention facilities would change the evidentiary picture immediately.
Prosecution is the second. The International Criminal Court and Ukraine’s own prosecutor general both have open investigations into conflict-related sexual violence. Cases involving Russian personnel will mostly proceed in absentia, since Moscow will not surrender suspects. Cases involving Ukrainian personnel are a test Kyiv now faces in public: it welcomed the report while declining to address its own forces’ conduct, and OHCHR has already said accountability efforts there fall short.
Care for survivors is the third and the most immediate. Ukraine’s health system and the aid organizations working alongside it have to reach a survivor population that is mostly male, mostly released prisoners of war, and largely invisible to programs designed for women. Bell’s point about different approaches was not a rhetorical aside. It describes a service gap that exists right now, for people who came home from captivity and have nowhere to go with what happened to them.
