This article contains testimonies that may be particularly distressing to read or listen to, but which we consider important in order to understand the situation in Ukraine. Any links we refer to are likely to contain explicit and unadulterated images.
These are extremely rare testimonies collected by a journalist from RTS. Perhaps the first to define to this extent the horror experienced by women and minors in Boutcha, Ukraine. This city where the bodies of civilians were discovered by the hundreds and which has become a symbol of the violence of the Russian military.
A mother agreed to break the silence to say what she had witnessed: incessant rapes during the Russian army’s occupation of her city. Soldiers have practically settled into their house and turned their house into hell. His daughter also wanted to testify.
A mother and her daughter tell of two weeks of rape and terror in Boutcha – Maurine Mercier
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We call her Ekatarina, 38 years old. She lives in a small house in Boutcha with her 13-year-old daughter and her 75-year-old mother. His mother is too old to run away. Therefore, these three women had to endure the Russian occupation. Her story begins as follows: They asked me to kneel down, says the mother. Then they said to me: ‘Your daughter is very beautiful…’ I asked her not to touch her with me, but don’t touch her.’ They forced me to perform oral sex on them. In turn, it never ended, they marched like they were on a treadmill.
To protect her daughter, this woman is raped several times a day. For two and a half weeks the soldiers – between 18 and 25 years old – never came alone, but always in groups. Some of them got into it. I believe that only my eyes and ears were not hurt, explains Ekatarina.
“They said to me, ‘Shut up! We were stationed in Belarus and it’s been a long time since we had a wife! So shut up!’ Otherwise they threatened to destroy the neighborhood, kill everyone, my neighbors, my daughter.”
Ekatarina tried in vain to reassure those she describes as “psychopaths”: “You kept asking me where the young people were. I told them I didn’t know. I told them that everyone fled the city killing and raping children.” Standing next to him is his 13-year-old daughter: “They asked me to watch my mother being raped … so that I could learn, they said, and with that they can use both of us.
“One night they came at eight. I slept. They got into bed and touched me, but finally they went to my mother. They raped her, all eight at the same time.
Ekatarina’s daughter, 38
“All of a sudden, their eyes spun and they went crazy again,” Ekatarina recalls. They were totally unpredictable. I really felt like we weren’t looking at soldiers, we were looking at people who had escaped from the hospital. That they were given guns and sent to war. You are not normal.
The mother describes these systematically drunken soldiers who would fire at the gate to signal their arrival at their home, who would remain in their yard swinging like pendulums for hours after raping them. His daughter didn’t escape this mental torture either: “One day they forced me to go into my neighbor’s small yard and the soldier said to me, ‘Look, I did that this morning. This is the woman I killed. Blood flowed from her mouth. I waited until she was in pain before I finished her.’ I asked him, “You really did that?” And he said, “Yes, I like to kill, that excites me.” He was 18, so 5 years older than me.”
They showed us their night vision goggles. We understood that they could see exactly who they were shooting at, that they knew what they were doing when killing civilians. A soldier told us, ‘It’s not war, it’s terrorism. It’s psychological torture. That way your President Zelenskyy will finally understand who we are!'”
To those who whisper—those men in the neighborhood—who sometimes hint that she could have avoided what happened to her, she replies: Those who tried to fight back died or watched, as did you Child was raped I don’t even know how to look at that. I looked these men straight in the eye. They were dead drunk and crazy. I knew what I had to do. This mother concludes, I think so, but I’m not sure we survived.