'This will not help us defeat the enemy'

A new report looks at Ukrainian Ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova, who was fired after officials couldn't confirm her stories of rape committed by Russian soldiers

On Monday, Ukrainian newspaper Ukrainska Pravda published an article about former Ukrainian Human Rights Commissioner Lyudmyla Denisova’s final months of work. Denisova was dismissed by Ukraine's parliament in May after losing a vote of no-confidence. Not long ago, though, Denisova was one of the Ukrainian officials most frequently cited by the media. Among other topics, she often spoke about crimes committed by the Russian military.

According to Ukrainska Pravda, after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Human Rights Commissioner’s office opened a hotline that, according to official data, fielded 50 thousand calls from February through May. People called with questions about everything from missing relatives to evacuation routes to Russian soldiers’ crimes. In the words of one employee, “everyone who could sit down at the phone did, and we took calls by the dozens.” UNICEF purchased additional phones and servers for the office.

On April 1, the office launched a “special helpline for psychological assistance,” claiming to have hired five professional psychologists to work the phones. In mid-April, the office released a report that said workers had received calls from 400 people, and that most of the calls concerned crimes of a sexual nature. The report also named one of the psychologists: Oleksandra Kvitko. In an interview with journalists, Kvitko recounted disturbing details from stories callers had allegedly told her. Similar stories later began appearing in official statements from the office, as well as from Denisova herself, including at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Oleksandra Kvitko is Lyudmyla Denisova’s daughter. According to Ukrainska Pravda, she began publicly participating in the ombudsman’s work at least as early as 2019. Kvitko's work on the hotline was fulfilled under a contract with UNICEF, so, according to the outlet, there was no formal conflict of interests (after her dismissal, Denisova said that the psychological assistance project was organized without her involvement).

According to a source from the office, the work of the “special helpline for psychological assistance,” for which Kvitko served as a consultant, differed markedly from the office’s other projects in its lack of transparency. Kvitko’s colleagues didn’t know “who was calling, how often, whether the calls were being recorded, or what kind of assistance was being provided to victims.” They didn’t even know the names of the psychologists working with Kvitko.

According to Ukrainska Pravda, journalists tried to verify the stories Denisova and Kvitko told publicly, but “couldn’t find confirmation for their materials.” The newspaper also reported that the ombudsman’s office never sent any information about the alleged crimes or the victims' contact information to law enforcement (after her dismissal, Denisova said that she didn’t have the right to report the information, and that only the “psychological consultants from the UNICEF hotlines” could do that.)

When Denisova’s subordinates asked about their manager’s odd behavior, according to a source from Ukrainska Pravda, the only response she gave them was that “we work on the information front.”

Employees from the Ukrainian Prosecutor’s Office tried to confirm Lyudmyla Denisova’s reports of children being raped: in April, they were able to confirm details of one such case, but meanwhile, the ombudsman’s office “was telling more and more new stories.” When they were unable to confirm any more of the stories, they decided to bring Denisova in for questioning in an attempt to determine who her sources were.

At her first interrogation, Denisova “was unable to name the source of her information,” but at the second one, shortly before she was fired, she admitted that she had “learned about everything from her daughter.” After that, Denisova allegedly explained to prosecutors that she “told these horrific stories because she wants Ukraine to be victorious,” according to Ukrainska Pravda.

Oleksandra Kvitko also underwent several interrogations, Ukrainska Pravda reported. According to the outlet, she told prosecutors that over the course of a month and a half, her hotline had received over a thousand calls, 450 of which concerned child rape. Officials, however, were only able to find records of 92 calls.

Kvitko wasn’t able to provide any details, including who called her or what doctors she directed the victims to. There was nothing that would indicate these victims actually existed. She said that she told her mother the stories “over tea.”

Ukrainska Pravda was unable to obtain comments from Lyudmyla Denisova, Oleksandra Kvitko, or UNICEF.

Several days before Denisova was fired, dozens of women who work at Ukrainian media outlets published a statement calling for her to publish only verified information, to choose her words carefully, and to avoid unnecessary details. “Sensational materials, stigmatization, insinuations, and lurid details surrounding human tragedies will not help us defeat the enemy or communicate the problem of sex crimes during the war,” read the letter.

According to Ukrainska Pravda, as of late June, Ukrainian police are investigating 20 cases of rape in which the primary suspects are Russian soldiers. According to lawyer Larisa Denisenko, this is a significant number given the heavy stigma rape victims face. The authors noted that a single investigation can involve multiple occurances, and that the statistics “might not reflect the real scale of the crimes.”

Ukrainska Pravda stressed that the article about Denisova “does not call into question the fact that Russians have committed rape in Ukraine.” But false stories about rape, they wrote, “only play into the hands of the enemy.”

Meduza wrote in detail about crimes (murder and rape) committed by Russian soldiers in the village of Bogdanivka in Ukraine’s Kyiv region when it was occupied by Russian troops in March 2022. One of those soldiers, Mikhail Romanov, is being tried in absentia in Ukraine for raping a Bogdanivka resident and killing her husband.