He returned home as a war hero. Behind closed doors, he became a tyrant

2026-03-15 - 08:44

Kyiv — Alisa still remembers the first time her husband hurt her. On leave from the front lines in eastern Ukraine, he was drinking and became aggressive. “Then he started to strangle me. Even he was frightened by what he had done,” Alisa told CNN. “If he wasn’t a soldier, I probably wouldn’t have put up with it,” said Alisa, who asked CNN to use a pseudonym because of safety and privacy concerns. “I told myself it wasn’t his fault and that I needed to be there for him. You can’t abandon someone because they saw something that broke them, maybe they just need help.” But things got worse. Each time her husband came home from the front, he became more abusive and more violent. Alisa’s is not a unique story. As in many countries, violence against women and girls was a problem in Ukraine even before Russia launched its unprovoked full-scale invasion in February 2022, but more than four years of war has deepened the crisis. According to a 2019 report, two-thirds of Ukrainian women reported having experienced psychological, physical or sexual violence since the age of 15. Ukraine made some progress on trying to tackle the issue, adopting stronger legislation and ratifying the Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. But UN Women warned last year that the war has “rolled back decades of progress” on women’s rights. Tetyana Zotova, head of a Kyiv center tackling domestic violence, says more military families, including soldiers themselves, are seeking help. Ivana Kottasova/CNN Colouring sheets seen inside a therapy room at a shelter in Kyiv. Ivana Kottasova/CNN Experts working in Ukraine have told CNN the number of cases they are dealing with is rising. The Ukrainian branch of La Strada, an international human rights NGO recorded a 20% increase in calls for help between 2022 and 2025, with the share of calls concerning physical violence increased by 5 percentage points. Halyna Skipalska, the country lead for HealthRight International and head of the Ukrainian Foundation for Public Health, which runs several women’s shelters and helplines, said everyone in Ukraine has been living with chronic stress for more than four years. “It affects people in different ways. Some seek help while others do not. There are many aspects to this – economic instability, psychological stress, alcohol and other addictions, feeling hopeless,” she said. “It is no secret that all these factors can lead to domestic violence,” she said. Calls for help from military families – including from soldiers who are struggling to control their aggression – are becoming more frequent, said Tetyana Zotova, the head of Kyiv City Center for Gender Equality, Prevention and Counteraction of Domestic Violence. Ukrainian servicemen ride a tank near the village of Robotyne in Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, on August 25, 2023. Viacheslav Ratynskyi/Reuters While this is partly because the Ukrainian military has more than tripled in size over the past four years, research across multiple countries has also shown that the prevalence of domestic violence is higher in military families compared to the general population. “The number of traumatized people is increasing. They have been to the front line and seen a completely different reality than in civilian life,” Zotova said. Post-traumatic stress disorder, exposure to violence, traumatic brain injuries, substance abuse, economic hardship and life-changing injuries have all been linked to increased rates of domestic violence. Yet the topic remains a taboo. ‘You should be grateful’ The war has had a heartbreaking impact on Ukrainians. The government doesn’t release official casualty data, but recent research estimated that between 100,000 and 140,000 people fighting for Ukraine have been killed. “Not every soldier will be a tyrant at home,” Zotova stressed, but the general recognition of the huge sacrifices made means the topic of domestic violence perpetrated by servicemembers remains “very, very sensitive.” Victims are less likely to report it and less likely to get support from those around them. “There is a belief that the perpetrator cannot be punished because he is a hero and a soldier, and there’s a lot of mistrust in authorities,” she said, adding that her department is running an awareness campaign around the issue. Olha is only too aware of this. When she called the police during one of her husband’s increasingly violent outbursts, they told her she should treat him better. “He is a soldier who was wounded. The police did nothing to him, but they gave me a fine for making a false report,” Olha told CNN. Olha, who asked CNN not to use her surname, said she called the police several times in the last few months she was living with her husband. “They did not respond to some of my calls at all. A few times they came and did nothing and then one time they finally recorded domestic violence and my husband and I went to a psychologist and to social services together,” she said. Olha told CNN she kept excusing her husband’s violence, blaming it on the trauma he suffered on the front lines. Ivana Kottasova/CNN The location of the shelter where Olha is currently staying is kept secret to protect the women there. Ivana Kottasova/CNN CNN has asked the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, which is responsible for the police, for comment on its handling of reports of domestic violence. But her husband’s willingness to seek help after the police intervention was short-lived, Olha said. Life soon settled back into a familiar pattern. “He would drink and I knew it would escalate, little by little, and then for two or three days it would be just awful... and then he would say he loves me very much and beats me out of jealousy, that he has never loved any woman so much and then he would cry and kneel in front of me,” she said. Her husband was self-medicating with painkillers, drinking heavily and lashing out at her. Yet she kept excusing his behavior, blaming it on the trauma he suffered on the front lines. “Terrible things happened to him there. He crawled through the forest for two days half dead. He never really recovered from that, he never healed, I saw that he never healed, either physically or psychologically,” she said. Then one day, he nearly killed her. “He was really angry, he put a bag over my head and wanted to cut off my ears, I mean, it was complete madness. He tried to break my leg with a hammer, to hurt me with a knife and with a potato peeler. When he let go of me, I ran away,” she said. She fled to a municipal “invincibility point,” a public space run by the authorities where people can get warm and charge their appliances during the frequent blackouts caused by Russia’s bombardment. “They called an ambulance and the police,” she said. The authorities helped to find a space for her at a women’s shelter in Kyiv. Finally, someone listened to her. Clasping her hands in her lap, hair tied into a long braid, the petite woman spoke with CNN in a secret compound in a residential building. She is safe there. The doors are locked, windows have security bars and a CCTV camera is always pointing at the entrance. Too scared to ask for help Escaping the horrifying cycle of domestic violence is incredibly difficult for any victim. But the war has made asking for help even harder for Ukrainian women. Ukraine introduced a new draft law in 2024 requiring all men between the ages of 18 and 60 to register with the military, with men aged 25 to 60 subject to mobilization. But many have ignored the law. According to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, some 2 million Ukrainians are currently “wanted” for avoiding the draft. On top of that, some 200,000 soldiers are absent without official leave. Some have fled the country, but many are still in Ukraine, flying under the radar to avoid getting caught. “These men stay at home. They cannot go outside because they could be taken by the police, they are under high level of stress, they can be addicted to alcohol and violent,” Skipalska said. “But it is very hard to deal with. Women often don’t want to report them because they are afraid that they will be taken to the army or to prison immediately,” she said. The stress of the war is impacting everyone across the country. Ludmyla experienced domestic violence throughout her 10-year-long marriage, but said the situation worsened when the war started. Ivana Kottasova/CNN Ludmyla, who asked CNN not to use her surname, said the war had made her domestic life a hell. She had spent 10 years married to a man who was controlling and sometimes physically aggressive toward her, Ludmyla told CNN at one of the shelters run by Skipalska’s group. “I endured it, thinking these were one-off incidents. My mother told me that everything would be fine... that we needed time to get used to each other and had to compromise with each other,” Ludmyla told CNN, cradling her little boy in her lap. But things got much worse after the invasion. Ludmyla’s husband, a foreigner exempt from the draft, lost his job as a security guard when his clientele fled Ukraine. He became dependent on Ludmyla, which he didn’t like. The aggression escalated after she gave birth to their son. “He controlled all my movements, all my finances, my communication with colleagues and friends,” she said. “He isolated me from the outside world and the blows became more powerful. He knows where to hit to make it hurt without it being visible on the outside, on the head or on the legs.” The last straw, she said, was when he threatened her in front of her son. “I decided that this was the end,” she told CNN. She and her little boy have been in the shelter for several months and are now preparing to move to a new apartment. “I want my child to grow up to be a well-rounded person, to have a role model who does not despise and devalue women.” Alisa, still only 23 years old, is now divorced and living on her own. She has had therapy and says she is now feeling happy and ready to live. She has got a new job, reconnected with old friends and made new ones Looking back, she is convinced her husband always had violent tendencies. “I don’t think war itself changes people. It just brings out what is already inside you. Most likely, his aggression would have come out at some point; the war just made it faster, stronger, harsher. But it didn’t change him,” she said. “There are many men who have experienced much worse things than (my husband) and they do not behave the way he did.”