‘Can I complain while we’re at war?’: Ukraine’s domestic violence dilemma

In May this year, Lubov Nedoriz, a volunteer social worker, received a call from the police in Pervomaiskyi, a town in the Ukrainian province of Kharkiv. The Russians had just launched an offensive in the region that continues today.

The police told her about a 30-year-old man who had recently returned from the frontline in Kharkiv and attacked his mother, who was now worried about his violent and angry behaviour.

“He used to be a good son, the mother later told me,” says Nedoriz. He had had a university education and was “very kind and loved his girlfriend”, but that changed after he had been sent to the frontline in Kharkiv.

“He became angry a lot, started listening to rock music and fought with his girlfriend. When his mother had tried to intervene, he severely beat her up.”

Nedoriz, who trained as a criminologist before the war, says such calls for help from law enforcement and women are becoming increasingly common.

With Russia’s war against Ukraine in its third year, many women in the country are now fighting their own battle, as the number of domestic violence cases increases significantly.

According to Ukraine’s internal affairs ministry, police registered more than 291,000 cases of domestic violence across the country in 2023 – a 20% increase on the previous year, when the Russian invasion began.

Experts and social workers expect these figures to rise again in 2024. In the first two months of this year, there was a 56% increase in complaints of domestic violence that were registered as criminal offences in Ukraine.

The reported cases are just “the tip of the iceberg” says Massimo Diana, from the UN’s Population Fund (UNFPA), which monitors gender-based violence.

“Numbers at times do not tell the full story,” he says. “[They] are only indicative of the number of filed reports. We need to put the numbers into the larger context to understand the problem.”

Diana says gender-based violence and domestic violence were “well-known secrets” in the country even before the war, but there was a higher risk with wartime stress factors, such as disruption to the family unit, losing one’s home and being displaced, poverty and the psychological stress of shelling and missile attacks.

“In the context of conflict or war, the unfortunate truth is that women and girls will always pay the heavier price,” says Diana.

With more men joining the war effort, many women find themselves managing their household alone and often isolated from the support of their families and communities.

Ivanna Kovalchuk, who works on gender-based violence at the International Medical Corps, says: “We find that women are less likely to complain when it [domestic violence] involves war veterans.

“Some even apologise if they do because they feel that it might not be an appropriate time or that their personal situation is not comparable to the war in the country,” she says.

Diana agrees. “In an environment that was inherently patriarchal from the beginning, even before the war, [with] a man who has been on the frontline and is a hero, but has become violent, there’s a problem with reporting.

“Women often question themselves: ‘how can I complain about anything when my husband, father, son, brother or friend are on the frontlines dying?’,” he says. “We’ve been hearing this a lot.”

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Referring to rising cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among returning veterans, Diana says the perpetrators of the violence were also “victims of the brutality of war”.

Nedoriz agrees, saying: “Our boys are returning from the battles changed, different. Even if they are physically OK, their minds are injured.”

Diana says he has witnessed similar developments in other conflict-affected societies. “Thirty years ago, this is what we had in Croatia, in Serbia, in Bosnia [and] we’re still dealing with the consequences of our late action in recognising the impact [on women].

“We need to work with the households where these combatants are returning to help prepare them on how to deal with the consequences of war. This is a pressure-cooker situation.”