"Peace" That Includes Occupation: A Guarantee of Additional Suffering

It seems self-evident that peace has to be preferable to war. However, after three visits to Ukraine, and after arranging with the Kyiv Region Police to talk with dozens of war crime victims, I no longer believe this.

In Ukraine, occupation by a brutal, genocidal invader can mean suffering worse than war itself. In the areas that the Russians have occupied, Ukrainian police have already documented hundreds of thousands of rapes, murders, and by some calculations, the Russians have forcefully abducted more than 200,000 children. 

In the case of the children, a typical Russian approach is to kidnap children, relocate them in Siberia or other areas many time zones away, and then destroy the children's papers. Without papers, the children will grow up as Russians and the parents will forever have lost any ability to find them.

Living under Russian occupation means suffering that will continue for generations. I talked with Ukrainians who told me that “Peace, if it means living under occupation will still be war, only under a different name.”

Rape: A Weapon of Subjugation

To see why people might feel that occupation means more suffering than war itself, let’s see how this plays out at the level of an individual. Marina Shevshenkova (not her real name) is one of the almost countless victims of weaponized rape.  

By the way, she’s a rarity in Ukraine because she’s willing to speak about her rape. In this area of the world, so much stigma is attached to rape that most women desperately resist disclosing what happened to them.

Shevshenkova is willing to talk because, "If people don’t speak up, the world won’t know about the violence of the Russians, their cruelty, and their murders.” Remembering the assault, she says, “The soldier told me, ‘You are going to do what I tell you to do. If you don’t, I’m taking you to the barracks where there are 10 hungry men and they will all rape you.’”

Shevshenkova looked at the machine gun he was carrying. She understood that it would only take one wrong look, one wrong word, one wrong movement, and he’d kill her. 

The ensuing rape meant layer upon layer of trauma. First, there was life-and-death terror from a man carrying a machine gun. Then there was the physical and emotional assault and added to this, feelings of utter powerlessness, violation, humiliation, and pain.

There was another dimension to her suffering. In the culture of Ukraine, it’s soul-poisoningly painful to be raped because it meant being stripped of honor or purity. As Ukrainian-born New York psychotherapist Viktor Dlugunovych says, “Because of this, being raped is one of the worst things that can happen to a woman.”

For Shevshenkova, even when the rape was over, the terror continued. During the 33 days of occupation, she knew that her rapist might be hunting for her, wanting to kill her. She figured he wouldn’t want a witness. 

Her fears were well-founded. In her work as a policewoman, Pryanishnikova has seen the bodies of many women with tell-tale round holes in the back of their skulls. “The holes are bullet holes. Killing rape victims is a common Russian tactic," she says, adding, “The rapists don’t want to leave anyone who can testify against them.” 

For Shevshenkova, one of the symptoms she endured after her rape was she found it impossible to live in the present. "It was like a video in an endless loop,” she told me. “I had a video in my head that would play over and over again, bringing me back to the exact moment of the raping. I couldn’t make it stop." 

She found herself stuck, living in the nightmarish past. Remembering those months, she says, “People would put pictures up to my face, pictures of people and even farm animals that I knew well, encouraging me to realize that I’m living in the now.”

The Devastation Beyond the Act

According to Dlugunovych, the prognosis for Shevshenkova is hopeful. The fact that she can talk about it gives her a head start on getting her life back. But for others, it’s likely to be harder. 

The invaders gang-raped a friend of hers, but even worse, they held the woman’s husband and forced him to watch his wife’s repeated rapings. It meant a double victimization because in a traditional Ukrainian household, it’s understood that a man’s role is to protect his wife.

In the diabolical cases in which the occupiers force men to watch their wives being raped, the husband is likely to feel unmanned because he failed to protect his wife. The wife may resent that her husband wasn’t able to protect her. 

Too often, this leaves the family permanently ruptured. It can destroy intimate relations between husband and wife, possibly forever. The family trauma will affect the children and may affect future generations. 

The Russians’ tactic of raping women, especially in the presence of their husbands, serves a dual purpose: it can permanently harm the woman and, while in the process, destroy the family unit. The end goal is demoralization so great that members of the family no longer have the ability to resist the occupation. 

For us in the West, the idea of peace may be alluring, but the people closest to the suffering are rightfully the ones to decide.  They know when “peace” is real or when it’s a guarantee of more suffering.