Low morale and foreign fighters among Russian troops will lead to severe sexual violence in Ukraine: experts

• Reports of rape by Russian-led forces are starting to pile up in Ukraine.
• Experts in wartime rape believe conditions in Ukraine make it ripe for sexual violence.

A 31-year-old Ukrainian woman reported that she was brutally and repeatedly raped at gunpoint by a Russian soldier when she was sheltering with her family on the floor of a school in the village of Malaya Rohan.

The woman told investigators from Human Rights Watch that Russian soldiers entered the village on February 25, and women and children took to a local school for shelter. On March 14, a Russian soldier entered the school, where she and others were hiding in the basement.

The soldier, she said, ordered the woman to follow him to a classroom, where he held a gun to her head and demanded oral sex, before shooting the ceiling twice and raping her.

Later, when she was dressing, the soldier said he was 20-years-old and she reminded him of a girl he went to school with — and told her to go to the basement where her daughter was sheltering to get her things and return to him.

She refused.

"I knew my daughter would cry if she saw me," the woman told Human Rights Watch.

The soldier then cut her neck with a knife and raped her again.

This woman's story is one of several reports of sexual violence in Russia's unprovoked war in Ukraine that are starting to pile up as atrocities carried out on the ground come to light.

Dara Cohen, a Harvard professor who researched wartime rape, told Insider that there are numerous factors of this conflict that make it especially ripe for sexual violence.

"We know that the Russian military has been reported in the recent past to use this violence, which I think is one of the strongest indications that they may use it again," Cohen told Insider. "A number of us — even at the very beginning before any reports started to come out — were quite concerned that this was going to be a case that we may see lots of reporting, and I really unfortunately have every expectation that we're gonna be receiving more and more reports."

Cohen, who is the author of "Rape During Civil War," has done extensive fieldwork researching sexual violence during conflicts around the world. She is also one of several researchers who work on an annual dataset that measures reports of conflict-related sexual violence committed by armed actors.

The data is collected from annual reports from Human Rights Watch, the State Department, and Amnesty International, so reports from the current conflict in Ukraine have not yet been added.

Even if it had, though, the researchers don't count individual victims, perpetrators, or incidents of rape during conflict, as it would be too difficult to quantify acts of gang rape or sexual servitude — and, overall, rape is the most under-reported crime, even in peacetime.

The researchers have, however, been able to use the past data to identify conditions of war where sexual violence is more common and severe — and several of those conditions are present in Ukraine, Cohen said.

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Sexual violence as a bonding mechanism

One of the factors that make researchers especially concerned about what's happening in Ukraine is sexual violence being used as a bonding mechanism for soldiers in conflicts where is a lack of cohesion among the fighters — like those where people have been kidnapped or forced to fight in the war, experts told Insider.

In Russia, about 25% of the military is believed to be made up of conscripts — or people drafted to serve.

Conscripts and foreign fighters are on the ground in Ukraine.

Rape — gang rape, in particular — is more likely to occur in these conditions.

"We know that when foreign fighters come to fight in other people's wars, there's an uptick in atrocities in general," Cohen said, noting that recent research shows the same goes for sexual violence in particular.

Austin Doctor is the Director of Counterterrorism Research Initiatives at National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE).

Through his work studying sexual violence among rebel forces he's learned that when foreign fighters are present, acts of sexual violence are more likely to take place.

"Thinking about gang rape, it can act as this sort of perverse means of socialization within combat units," Doctor told Insider. "With the Russian forces is creating these combat units out of individuals that are Russian, that are Chechen, that are Syrian, there's, there's a lack of cohesion or interpersonal connection between those comrades and arms and sexual violence can play a role in building relationships and trust."

Doctor said that when thinking about Chechen and Syrian fighters, it's particularly concerning, because they likely don't have a history of urban combat and having to navigate an unfamiliar environment could enhance the low morale already taking place among pro-Russian troops.

"It's not just the weakened cohesion that can come from forces made up of persons from far flung communities, but it's the low morale that we're seeing in the Russian ranks that can create a perceived need for a sexual violence being perpetrated by these units," Doctor said.

The biggest red flag for Cohen, though, is that Russian-led forces have committed acts of sexual violence in recent invasions, so it only makes sense that they'd do it again.

Since 2016, there have been reports of sexual violence by Russian forces, Russian-backed separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk, as well as Ukrainian forces, Georgetown University researcher Robert Nagel told Insider, of what the data shows.

The highest reported prevalence of sexual violence in Ukraine was by Russian forces in 2017, when it reached "systematic or massive levels," he said.

Chechen and Syrian fighters also have a history of sexual violence in wartime, Doctor said.

"Just simply looking at recent history by these very same armed forces ... we can show that Russian-led forces have used sexual violence in Ukraine in the recent past. And we know that the Russian military was reported to have committed rape in Chechnya for every single year, for seven years in a row at the turn of the century," Cohen told Insider. "So we know that the Russian military in general has been reported to use this violence, which I think is one of the strongest indications that they may be likely to use it again."

Sexual violence is a weapon of war — and it doesn't discriminate

When people think of wartime sexual violence, they may imagine men as the perpetrators and women as the victims, but that's not always the case, Cohen told Insider.

Cohen's research has showed that in cases where there are large number of female fighters, there are reports of women carrying out sexual violence.

While that may not be the case in Ukraine, Cohen said that there are likely to be male victims.

"Our dataset shows, for example, in recent years that in Ukraine, Russian led forces were reported to have committed sexual violence against people who are detained, and many individuals who are detained are men," Cohen told Insider.

Rape and sexual assault are considered war crimes. Ukraine's prosecutor general and the international Criminal Court have said they will open investigations into reports of sexual violence.