Svitlana learned of her pregnancy at 23 weeks, when it was already too late for an abortion. That is how her youngest son came into the world, a boy she gave birth to from a Russian occupier-turned-rapist.
Law enforcement officers are investigating this war crime: the woman has been recognized as a victim, and investigators continue to search for her assailant. Meanwhile, Svitlana is raising six children. Her youngest son hugs and kisses her without any prompting, and she admits: Only now is she learning to be the gentle mother for her children that she always wanted to be. Slidstvo.Info is publishing her story for the first time.
Three boys and three girls
The day of the 32-year-old Svitlana differs little from the days of other mothers of many children: prepare food, clean, work in the garden, run to the store, and – in between all that – take care of the children. Her youngest son hardly leaves her side.
The older daughters look after the three younger brothers, who also try to help: they bring water in a mug, open the door, or hand their mother the needed item.
The oldest daughter is 16, and the youngest son is 3 years old. It so happened that the children are from different men. The woman is raising all six on her own.
The sound of children’s laughter can be heard from Svitlana’s house even from the street. Near the gate, a small dog barks loudly on a chain. A rose bush stretches toward the roof of the house. On a clothesline stretched from the garage to the shed, about a dozen colorful pants and shirts dry, from the smallest size to teenage.
The owners of this clothing keep chasing after a ginger cat with her kitten — they try to pick them up and play.
Svitlana invites me, along with the camerawoman, into the yard, and it becomes immediately clear that she has prepared for our arrival. She put on a black T-shirt with patterns on the shoulders, a pink skirt above the knee, and gathered her dark dyed hair into a ponytail. She wears a chain around her neck and rings on her fingers.
It is stuffy inside the house, but all seven hide there from the heat. The girls sit on their phones, the boys assemble a construction set.
We brought paints, and the teenage girls smiled shyly as it is the first time they see their mother pick up a brush and draw yellow lines. The youngest boy brings a glass of water. Svitlana smiles: “Got Mommy some water.” A moment later, the children are already arguing over the brush, and she calmly separates them: “Wait. Take turns.”
Painting has captivated Svitlana. Although psychologists advised her to draw in moments when memories of the rape accumulate, she never dared to do it.
The family rents a two-room house in Mykolaiv Oblast. They moved to this village from de-occupied Kherson Oblast. Svitlana could not stay in her native village of Mala Oleksandrivka because everything reminded her of what she experienced during the occupation.
The children sleep on a bunk bed and on sofas. Clothes are piled on a chair; items that probably did not fit into the overstuffed closets. The light is dim even at midday. In one room, there is a computer, in the other a bulky television. Colorful carpets cover both the floor and the walls.
There are no playgrounds or kindergartens nearby. Her eldest son is already six, but he won’t start school until next year because he still doesn’t speak very well.
Growing up, Svitlana did not know what gentle treatment from parents was like. As a child, she imagined her future completely differently. She wanted to become an accountant to work with computers. She trained as a cook, dreamed of giving birth to a boy and a girl after turning 20.
Svitlana finally remains alone in one of the rooms and silently stares at her reflection in the mirror. After about ten seconds, she walks away. It seems that in another moment she would have cried.
Only after that does she begin to tell her story: “I have six children; the youngest is from an occupier. Evenly: exactly three boys and three girls.”
“Go with him”
Back in winter 2022, Svitlana did not believe that Russia would really dare to start a full-scale war. She says she lived carefree, did not work, and raised the children, including a newborn boy, with her common-law husband, Oleh.
“Before the New Year, I opened TikTok. I see a video pop up that the war will start. I was like: hee-hee, ha-ha. What war? But when it already started, it was no longer funny,” Svitlana recalls.
At the beginning of March 2022, Russian tanks entered the village of Mala Oleksandrivka. Occupiers began going house to house — looking for men with military experience, young women, and children, Svitlana recalls. All her neighbors left, so the woman with children became scared. Then she moved to the neighboring street, to Oleh’s house. It was already there that the Russians wanted to kidnap her youngest son — they came into the house and threatened her. She recalls: “The Russians rummaged through the rooms and on the roof, looking for who knows what. Once they came in and said, ‘We need the little one, we are taking him to Russia, let him live there.’ And then they also said: ‘Mind you, we can just kill you and take him anyway.’”
In the end, the Russians did not take her child.
Svitlana was mostly at home, while Oleh went out more and more often. She thought he was mowing grass somewhere. Then her partner began returning later and later, and more and more often drunk. She did not know until the last that her common-law husband was drinking with Russian soldiers. In May 2022, Oleh drove up to their yard with two Russians. He called Svitlana out of the house. She recalls: “He says: ‘Meet, this is Shakh — nickname, and this one… I do not even remember the second nickname — his brother.’ I came out, said something, and left.”
A few days after the meeting, the Russians, with Oleh, came to the house again. In the afternoon, a white van pulled up, and her partner told Svitlana, “You need to go with them.” She tried to refuse: “No matter how I begged. I did not know where I was going. I did not want to go anywhere. In the end, I decided to go. As soon as I reached the gate, they put a black mask on me, some dark green one, over my eyes. They did not put one on my partner. He was also in the car.”
After 15 minutes, the car stopped, and the Russian soldiers removed the mask from Svitlana. She saw a market, a bank, stores, and recognized the neighboring village, Velyka Oleksandrivka.
“My partner says: ‘You go with him’ and points to Shakh,” Svitlana recounts. “I did not hesitate, because this Russian had a grenade, a knife, a weapon with him. We went up to the second floor of the store. I looked out the window, and there were no people at all. Shout: ‘Help’? They would not have heard me anyway. But I still shouted out the window.
The doors closed, and he took off all that weaponry… I did not even know where to go. There were some oilcloths and clothes on the floor… The grenade stayed near him during the rape; it probably lasted about five minutes. I did not want it, and I was crying. He said: ‘Do not cry, do not cry.’ I already understood that crying meant nothing to them.
‘Do not scream,’ he said, and he covered my mouth so I would not scream.”
After the rape, the soldier put the weaponry back on: “I just ran out and shouted: ‘Help!’ And he said to me again in his special accent: ‘What are you yelling for? No one will hear you anyway.’ At that time, there were no people around at all. There were shelling and explosions.”
Svitlana was driven home in the same white van by the same two Russian soldiers and Oleh. For several days after the rape, Svitlana said nothing to him: “I did not know how Oleh would react to this. The same Russians kept driving to my partner’s house every day. Then I no longer went out to them, but I knew that the rapist had returned to our house.”
When she finally dared to tell her partner, he got angry and replied: “‘And why did you go?’ And I say: ‘Well, you yourself said that I needed to go.’”
Svitlana was afraid to appeal to the Russian command, because the rapist could find her and kill her. She heard a similar story: “Nearby, in the village of Davydiv Brid, a woman was raped in front of her husband. They went to complain to the Russian commander, and both were immediately killed.”
Later, Oleh got so drunk that he beat Svitlana’s young son from her previous husband. The Russians found out about it and beat him. He got scared, swam across the Inhulets River to unoccupied territory, and Svitlana was left alone with the children. The Russians no longer bothered her; on the contrary, at the direction of the village head, they even brought milk and diapers.
Svitlana lived in Mala Oleksandrivka under occupation for seven months. At that time, out of 1,500 locals, only 300 remained. Ukrainian paratroopers liberated the village at the beginning of October 2022. The very next month, Svitlana left. She says she could not stay there any longer as everything reminded her of what she had experienced.
Already on territory controlled by Ukraine, she turned to a gynecologist: “Whenever I smoked, I felt nauseous, that is all. I knew it could be from the pressure. There in the occupation there was no test anywhere, where to get that test? And when I had already arrived here, I began to hear the child’s heartbeat. How the child punches and kicks. Until the last, I convinced myself, maybe it is not true.”
The gynecologist informed her that the pregnancy was already at 23 weeks. That same day, the doctor contacted the police and reported a patient who had survived rape. Law enforcement officers questioned Svitlana and opened a criminal case.
The woman hesitated about whether to have an abortion. But everyone began to dissuade her: “Mom, sister, doctors said that the child is already formed. ‘Why will you take sin upon yourself?’ So I did not dare.”
Three months later, a boy was born. The birth went easily. The child is healthy.
“Let him bear punishment”
The first months after giving birth were difficult. Svitlana feared her son would physically resemble his rapist. She says that has not happened yet. Perhaps also because of that, she rarely recalls the abuse, Svitlana adds.
Now the boy is three years old. He is the youngest in the large family. Svitlana says she loves all six children equally.
While we talk in the yard, the boy brings his mother water, then tries to snatch the brush from the older ones when they all draw together. In a few minutes, he is already running back and hugging her tightly.
“Sometimes you don’t even have to ask him—he just comes and hugs me. When he grows up, I think he’ll understand everything. There’s already something different about him, something mature,” says Svitlana. At the same time, she admits she’s still learning how to be a mother: “Once, a man brought firewood to our yard with his daughter. He spoke gently to his little one, and for the first time in my life, I realized that you can speak to a child with kindness.”
Since 2024, Svitlana has started smoking again. Sometimes she has nightmares—like dreams of graves—hinting that she’s struggling. She also plans to return to therapy with a psychologist.
Law enforcement officers have recognized Svitlana as a victim in a war crime case. According to the head of the investigative department of the Main Directorate of the National Police in Kherson Oblast, Ihor Demyaniuk, investigators identified several Russian soldiers who could have been involved in the rape, but Svitlana did not recognize any of them. The investigation continues. The police of Kherson Oblast are investigating 270 crimes committed by Russian soldiers during the occupation of the Velyka Oleksandrivka territorial community: the Russians killed two people and raped two.
Svitlana does not hide that she wants the harshest punishment for her assailant. She says he must bear the same responsibility as the rest of the Russian soldiers who committed sexual violence against Ukrainian women: “Let him be in captivity, like our [guys]. The Russians locked ours in wells, cellars — just ordinary people who did nothing [wrong]. Lock him up like that and forget about him for some time. Let him bear punishment. Let all the Russian soldiers who abused women bear it. I consider them b******s who came and did such things in Ukraine… I am suffering, and besides me, how many people… How many they are killing. They are not people, they are monsters.”
While the investigation continues, Svitlana does every day what is most important to her now — she raises six children. The youngest son, whom she once feared she would not accept, runs up to his mother with a small ginger kitten: “Here, pet him!” And then he himself snuggles up to her.
