A woman reports that a Russian soldier repeatedly raped her at a school in the Kharkiv region.

She tells Human Rights Watch that he beat her and cut her face, neck and hair with a knife.

Ukraine's human rights ombudsman Lyudmila Denisova writes on Telegram that near a road 20 kilometers from Kyiv, Russians threw four or five naked women onto a pile of car tires and tried to set them on fire.

Tobias Schrors

political editor.

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A 50-year-old woman shows a BBC journalist the grave of her husband, who tried in vain to protect her from her tormentor.

These are just a few of the cases of sexualized violence by Russian soldiers in Ukraine that have now been documented.

In armed conflicts, women and girls in particular are at risk of becoming victims of sexualised violence.

It has always been like this.

Tens of thousands of women and girls were raped in the Bosnian war in the early 1990s.

To this day, many still don't talk about what they went through.

Even before the Russian troops withdrew from the occupied towns around Kyiv at the beginning of April, the Ukrainian Attorney General Iryna Venediktova reported the first charges against a Russian soldier who is said to have killed an unarmed civilian near Brovary and raped his wife several times.

Since then, many more investigations have been added.

The observation mission of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights alone, which has been in Ukraine since 2014, says it has so far reported 75 suspected cases from all over the country, especially from the Kyiv area.

Is there a system in the rapes by Russian soldiers?

Weapon of War or Opportunism?

Human Rights Watch's Hillary Margolis says there is "certain evidence that sexualized violence is perpetrated in the Ukraine war."

But it is still unclear to what extent and in what way.

Sexualised violence often occurs in conflicts or wars.

Sometimes simply because someone is taking advantage of the situation.

In other cases, sexualized violence is deliberately used to terrorize, torture and harm a specific population or community.

Then it is about rape as a weapon of war.

It is not yet possible to say whether this will be the case in the Ukraine war.

So far there is not enough information.

In any case, counting the cases is only the second step.

First and foremost, survivors needed help, especially acute medical care.

"The urgency of ensuring medical and psychosocial support for victims is often overlooked," says Margolis.

Jaime Nadal from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Ukraine, who supports the government in Kyiv, expresses it similarly.

"We are concerned about how care for women, girls and men who have suffered sexualised violence can be ensured again," he says.

Among other things, his organization distributes emergency kits with the things and medicines that doctors need for medical care after a rape.

"The treatment must be carried out within a time window of 72 hours, women often only receive the care weeks later," says Nadal.

Then it's a matter of looking at whether there is already a sexually transmitted disease or pregnancy and what can be done.

The population fund supports 97 maternity clinics in Ukraine, ten of which have been destroyed, according to Nadal.

In regions like Luhansk in the east of the country there are simply no longer any health facilities, and the development in cities like the encircled Mariupol is similar.

Tons of medical material has already been shipped, mobile mini-hospitals in containers are being used to remedy the situation.