Day after day, in town after town, a police officer and a prosecutor go door to door in the Kherson region of Ukraine.
Walking through muddy streets, past houses destroyed by artillery fire, they search for those left behind. The two men form a special unit that has traveled from the capital, Kyiv.
Mother and daughter go out into their yard. “We are looking for sexual crimes,” says prosecutor Oleksandr Kleshchenko.
Until the beginning of October, this part of the country was occupied by Russian troops. Burnt cars litter the fields. The letter “Z” – a symbol used by Russian 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 have said. They have even aired allegations of Russian soldiers carrying Viagra.
Russian authorities have denied accusations of war crimes in Ukraine.
In two weeks of work in the Kherson region, the team from Kyiv has documented six complaints of sexual assault. The real 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.
Walking over broken glass, she shows us to her brother’s house, where she says two Russian soldiers forced their way through her door on August 26.
“They walked around these rooms,” he says. “One stayed there and the other who raped me came in here. He came in, walked around the room a little bit, and here in this place, he started groping me.”
“I told him, no, no, I’m not old enough to give you anything, look for younger girls.”
He pinned her against the closet, she says, and tore off her clothes. “I was crying, begging him to stop, but to no avail,” she says. “The only thought I had was staying alive.”
He warned her not to tell anyone, she recalls. “I didn’t tell my husband right away,” she says tearfully. “But I told my cousin and my husband heard it. He said, “You should have told me the truth, but you remained silent.”
“I was very embarrassed,” she says. “I wish he and all his relatives were dead.”
She spent three days at home, in a daze, too embarrassed to go out. Then, in an extraordinary act of bravery, he says he confronted the Russian soldier’s commander.
“His commander found his unit leader. He came to see me and said “I punished him severely, I broke his jaw, but the severest punishment is ahead.” Like a shot. The commander asked me, “Do you mind that?” I said, “I don’t mind, I wish they’d shoot them all.”
Although the prosecutor, Kleshchenko, and the police officer, Oleksandr Svidro, are looking for specific evidence of sexual crimes, everywhere they go they are confronted with the horrors of possession.
In these liberated villages, almost all the buildings have been damaged by the war. Many houses became ruins.
At their first stop on the day CNN accompanied the investigators, in Bila Krynytsya, a crowd waiting for food handouts surrounded the prosecutor.
The village was behind Russian lines, but was never directly captured. Those gathered shout that they have been abandoned for months, with no help from either Russia or Ukraine.
“You made a report [the damage] to anyone?” asks the prosecutor. “Who are we going to report this to?” replies a man in the crowd.
A man in the crowd tells investigators he was detained by Russian soldiers and subjected to a mock execution. It’s hard to hear, torture stories like this are common here, but that’s not what their job is about today.
Despite these villagers’ resentment, Ukraine’s counteroffensive in that part of the country has fueled public hopes that victory may indeed be possible – or at least that Kyiv could liberate key Russian-held cities such as Kherson.
Beginning slowly in late summer and then in large part in early October, Ukrainian forces have retaken hundreds of square miles of territory held by Russia since the first days of its full-scale invasion.
A short drive down bomb-strewn streets in Tverdomedove, a mother and daughter tell Kleshchenko they haven’t heard of any sex crimes in their one-way settlement.
Their neighbor, 71-year-old Vera Lapusniak, is crying uncontrollably. The Russians were kind when they first arrived, he says.
“They said they came to protect us,” he recalls. “But by whom, why – we didn’t know.”
She was widowed more than 30 years ago – she says her husband died in a motorcycle accident – and her son joined the army soon after Russia invaded on February 24. She decided to leave, she says, about three months after Russian troops occupied her village.
Months later, after the Ukrainian army liberated her village in a lightning counterattack, she returned. Shelling had reduced her roof to her rafters.
“I don’t know where to sleep now,” she says tearfully. “There are no windows or doors. I sleep like a bum.”
He shows us inside. The ceiling of her bedroom has completely collapsed. She has moved her bed into the only room that still has an intact window.
“I don’t know where to put it so it (the ceiling) doesn’t fall on my head,” he says. “If it fell and killed me, it would be better, so I wouldn’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 Novovoznesen’ke, a village where they have uncovered two more cases of rape, allegedly by Russian soldiers. The next day, they return to Kyiv to present their findings.
Of course, many of these claims will be impossible to prove. many do not even suspect. For now, the group is filing its reports and its investigators are continuing their work, hoping to file charges in the future.
The United Nations says it has investigated cases in Ukraine of “sexual and gender-based violence” against people between the ages of 4 and 82. By September, 43 criminal proceedings had been initiated, according to the UN.
The police officer, Svidro, says that most cases of sexual violence go completely unreported.
The project does its thing. “It’s psychologically difficult,” he says. “You understand that every person is upset. But this is important work.”
