A Russian soldier repeatedly raped a young mother while holding a knife to her throat, amid growing evidence of sexual violence being used as a weapon of war in Ukraine.

Olha – not her real name – had sought shelter with her mother, siblings and five-year-old daughter in the basement of a school in Malaya Rohan, a village in the Kharkhiv region which had been occupied by Russian forces from Feb 25.

At around midnight on March 13, a Russian soldier armed with an assault rifle and a pistol forcibly entered the school. He made the 40 villagers in the basement line up and told Olha to hand over her child, which she refused to do.

After a few hours, he ordered her to follow him out of the basement to a classroom on a second floor, where he forced her to perform oral sex and made her undress.

“The whole time he held the gun near my temple or put it into my face,” the 31-year-old told Human Rights Watch. “Twice he shot at the ceiling and said it was to give me ‘more motivation’.”

The soldier, who revealed he was 20, then raped her. When she sought permission to put her clothes back on, the soldier would only allow her to wear a top, telling her to keep her bottom half naked. She was raped again, with a knife held to her throat.

Photographs shared with Human Rights Watch, dated March 19 and 20, showed cut marks and bruising on Olha’s face and neck, where the soldier hit her face with a book and repeatedly slapped her. “I am lucky to be alive,” she said after reaching a bomb shelter in Kharkiv when the soldier left the school.