The report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) says that these are only confirmed cases and that the true scale of the violence is significantly higher. In total, the report describes cases involving 1,004 people, and 20 incidents included in the document occurred before February 24, 2022, and had not previously been counted by OHCHR. In UN terminology, one documented “case” means one victim, who may have experienced several episodes of sexualized violence.
OHCHR attributes 892 cases to the Russian side, including 20 prewar cases. The report says that sexualized violence was used by Russian military personnel, employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service and the FSB, and other representatives of Russian authorities against prisoners of war and detained civilians as a form of torture, humiliation, punishment, and coercion. The victims in this group include 725 men, 151 women, 14 girls, and two boys.
Such incidents were recorded especially often in relation to Ukrainian prisoners of war. The UN interviewed 915 Ukrainian servicemen and medical workers released from Russian captivity, and 572 of them, or 63%, gave detailed accounts of sexualized violence. Among them were 545 men and 27 women; eight men and three women reported rape, and one of the women was raped by several people. Of these 572 people, 155 reported electric shocks to the genitals, 246 reported beatings to the genitals, 372 reported forced nudity, and 348 were beaten or shocked while naked.
OHCHR documented such cases in 83 official places of detention and 81 unofficial or transit facilities in the occupied territory of six regions of Ukraine and in 25 regions of Russia. In 26 official institutions, OHCHR documented at least ten cases. Another 205 confirmed cases involve Ukrainian civilians whom the Russian authorities held in detention after the start of the full-scale invasion; among them were 156 men, 48 women, and one boy. In this group, 13 people were subjected to rape, including two women to gang rape, 50 people reported electric shocks to the genitals or nipples, 40 reported blows to the genitals, and 76 reported forced nudity.
Outside detention facilities in occupied territories, the UN documented sexualized violence against 95 civilians, including 72 women, eight men, 14 girls, and one boy. Fifty-seven people reported rape by Russian military personnel, 15 reported gang rape, and three women later had to give birth to children conceived as a result of rape. OHCHR attributes 112 cases of sexualized violence to the Ukrainian side — against 98 men and 14 women.
Among 881 Russian and foreign prisoners of war interviewed, 63 people, or 7%, reported sexualized violence by the Ukrainian authorities; OHCHR did not document any rapes or attempted rapes among them, but recorded electric shocks and beatings to the genitals, forced nudity, and threats of rape or castration. Another 49 of the 656 detained persons interviewed in war-related cases reported such violence; among them, the UN did not record any rapes, but documented two attempted rapes and two sexualized assaults, and nearly half of the violations attributed to the Ukrainian side consisted only of threats of sexualized violence.
OHCHR emphasizes that, because observers are denied access to the occupied territories and to Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilian detainees, and because of trauma, fear of stigma, and retaliation, many victims do not report what they experienced. The report also says that Russia has not taken any noticeable steps to investigate and punish such crimes, whereas Ukraine provides the UN with access to prisoners and detainees and has taken measures to prevent similar violations; at the same time, OHCHR is not aware of a single case of sexualized violence by Ukrainian representatives that had advanced beyond the investigation stage by July 2026.
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