Ukrainian director Alisa Kovalenko has brought her documentary Traces to Stockholm, where it was shown to around 50 invited guests on 30 September. The film follows six Ukrainian women who survived conflict-related sexual violence and torture during Russia’s war against Ukraine, and it is now competing for the Oscar for best international feature. Kovalenko attended the Swedish screening in person.
Kovalenko is herself a survivor of rape. She was detained in 2014 while documenting volunteer aid work at the front in Donbas, and she has said that experience is when she decided to do everything she could to fight back. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion, she returned to the front line as a soldier. She told SVT she hesitated at first to make the film, because she knew it would reopen old wounds.
Her view changed after she met other women who had been raped by Russian soldiers, among them Iryna Dovhan, founder of the organisation SEMA-Ukraine. Dovhan has spent several years seeking out survivors in areas recaptured from the Russian army, and her group has documented 42 rapes by Russian soldiers. She says recording these crimes for future generations is essential, arguing that silence would amount to granting the perpetrators an amnesty.
Traces premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2026 and won the audience award there, the first Ukrainian film to receive it. SVT’s culture programme Kulturnyheterna interviewed Kovalenko, Dovhan and Halyna Tyshchenko, another of the women in the film, who has turned her own trauma into work against sexual violence in war. Kovalenko said she is proud of the women for choosing to speak openly. Tyshchenko’s work now focuses on supporting others and pressing for these crimes to be recognised.
Several human rights organisations have reported large numbers of sexual assaults by Russian soldiers in occupied parts of Ukraine, and conflict-related sexual violence is increasingly treated as a war crime to be investigated, and the women in Traces have set aside shame to talk about what happened to them. The Academy Awards ceremony takes place in March 2027, and the film’s Oscar campaign gives its subjects a much larger audience. For Kovalenko, the project joins her personal history to a wider effort to document crimes that often go unreported. SVT published details of Swedish support lines for people affected by sexual violence alongside its report.
