‘A Good Career, if I Satisfied Him.’ Ukraine Fights Sexual Abuse, and a War.

VINNYTSIA, Ukraine — On her first day of service as a commissioned officer of the Ukrainian military, Lt. Valeria Sikal reported for duty at her base and received an unusual order.

She said the commander, Col. Viktor Ivaniv, ordered her to accompany him in his personal car for a trip to a summerhouse to meet a friend, who turned out to be a local police chief.

The colonel then “ordered me to sit beside him,” and though he was her commanding officer, he “tried to touch me and patted my leg,” said Lieutenant Sikal, who is 24 and has become the first woman to speak out about sexual harassment in the Ukrainian Army.

“He promised me a good career if I satisfied him,” she said of the episode in January 2018. “I felt like a whore. He was bragging that he could do anything he wanted with us.”

Colonel Ivaniv, who declined to be interviewed for this article and has denied engaging in any abuse, has retained his command. A Defense Ministry spokesman, Col. Bohdan Senyk, said that the base commander faced accusations but they had not been proved in court.

“Anyone can be accused,” he said. “Men also accuse women.”

The country’s military, poor and under tremendous pressure from a smoldering shooting war with Russian-backed rebels, is admired for recent changes that have greatly improved its professionalism and battlefield resilience. The United States has provided more than $1 billion to the Ukrainian Army since 2014. But sexual harassment remains an unacknowledged problem.

Formally, the military has promoted attempts to improve gender equality. In 2018, it expanded a list of positions that women can hold to gunners on armored vehicles, snipers and infantry commanders. Sexual harassment is illegal in Ukraine, in private companies and the military. Under the law, superior officers who coerce subordinates into sexual relationships can be jailed for up to six months.

Yet, while 57,000 women currently work in the Ukrainian military, with 26,000 on active duty, the authorities last year registered only five sexual harassment cases, including Lieutenant Sikal’s. In the course of the five-year war, no top army commander has ever been disciplined for sexual abuse.

Though sexual abuse in the army is widespread, Ukrainian rights groups say, it is typically overlooked in a society reluctant to criticize soldiers during a war.

That has led to an agreed conspiracy of silence, said an activist, Vitaly Pavlovsky, director of the nongovernmental group Auditing Authority. If victims speak out, he said, they risk dismissal and the loss of their military housing.

“To prove harassment, a victim must find like-minded people or other victims who will be ready to risk their careers,” he said. They must “be ready for conflicts in the family and to be attacked in public,” as was the case with Lieutenant Sikal.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry is reluctant to prosecute sexual abuse in the ranks, Mr. Pavlovsky said, for fear of damaging the image of the army. But protecting abusive officers, he said, only “creates an impotent and weak army, physically and in spirit.”

Bolstering Lieutenant Sikal’s case, seven other women have told investigators about alleged sexual harassment by Colonel Ivaniv, according to transcripts provided to a military office that looks into morale problems in the army, but does not have authority to press charges. One woman said he had forced her to sleep with a general, according to the transcripts. Another said she resorted to asking her male relatives to help protect her from him.

Colonel Ivaniv’s former deputy, Lt. Col. Viktor Mishchuk, said he had been compelled to carry out demeaning and abusive orders on behalf of the colonel.

“Ivaniv noticed that a girl had three earrings in one ear,” he said in a phone interview. “He asked me to check if she had piercings on her breasts,” as well. “With his actions, he humiliates the honor and dignity of a Ukrainian military officer.”

Women harassed at work say they do not trust the authorities to take their side, so few report the episodes. “Unfortunately, this is a problem not only of the Ukrainian Army, but of our society,” said Alona Kryvuliak of La Strada Ukraine, a group opposing gender discrimination. “These cases kill the inner motivation for women to seek help.”

Ukraine, of course, is hardly the only country with sexual abuse in the military. This year, Senator Martha McSally, an Arizona Republican who was the first American female fighter pilot to fly in combat, told a committee hearing that a superior officer in the Air Force had raped her, and that when she tried to report it to military officials she “felt like the system was raping me all over again.”

For Lieutenant Sikal, the trip to the summerhouse on Jan. 3, 2018, was just the start. There, sitting with the police chief, Lieutenant Sikal said the colonel boasted of the attractive junior officers under his command. He then asked her to kiss the policeman, she said.

“He bragged that he had two young, new female lieutenants and suggested we all take a sauna together,” she said, her voice trembling.

For months, she said, daily harassment ensued and she tried a variety of ways to escape him. She tried hiding and directly confronting him with a plea to stop. Nothing worked.

“His apartment was one floor above mine” in the barracks, she said. “He was coming drunk, checking my underwear in the drawers of my nightstand. Once, he said my sofa was good and suggested we check it.”

Every new rejection caused further humiliation, punitive reprimands and senseless orders, she said.

“I was not a human for him,” Lieutenant Sikal said.

Finally last December, she filed a sexual harassment complaint with military prosecutors and the national police authorities that is still under investigation.

She said the local police did not take Lieutenant Sikal’s complaint seriously until activists pressured the leadership. An officer on a military hotline for complaints said he could do nothing. Prosecutors initially rejected her written report. She said she felt invisible to the police.

It is far from clear whether Lieutenant Sikal will prevail in her case. After she gave interviews to the Ukrainian news media, a taxi driver tried to punch her when she got into his cab, she said. Fellow soldiers heaped abuse on her online.

“Valeria, if you cannot resist ordinary harassment in training, what will happen to you in a combat unit or if you are captured,” one man, who identified himself as Yuriy Opr, wrote in comments under an article in Strana.ru, an online news portal.

“Her approach has no place in the armed forces,” he added. “I am writing for myself and my sworn brothers.”

A man who identified himself as Viktor Margelov wrote, “Why did you wait a year” before filing a complaint? Another, Pavel Vasiliev, answered, “Perhaps she liked it.” Lieutenant Sikal’s husband, Oleksi Vdovychenko, himself a veteran of the war in eastern Ukraine, now regularly receives anonymous phone threats.

“I don’t feel that the state can defend me,” Lieutenant Sikal said. “The state is passive in this case.”