As Russian troops withdrew from areas around Kyiv, officials, aid workers and journalists received reports from local residents that soldiers had raped them. A Ukrainian lawmaker said sexual violence is “systematic in all areas occupied by the Russians”.
“Rape is used in Ukraine as a weapon of war to break our spirits, humiliate us and show us that we can be helpless when it comes to protecting our women and children and their bodies,” said Kira Rudyk, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, told CBS News. “It happens systematically in the occupied territories.”
Rudyk has collected evidence and testimonies in hopes that the perpetrators will eventually be brought to justice.
“First we worked to ensure women were safe and received medical attention. And I can tell you that some of them were actually pregnant by Russian soldiers who raped them,” Rudyk said.
She visited Bucha shortly after Russian troops left, and once the people’s immediate medical needs were met, she said she used a combination of phone records and documents left behind “to get the names and surnames of the soldiers who committed these crimes.” committed … We are gathering more and more evidence and information about them.”
Destroyed houses in the village of Lypivka, Kyiv region, April 12, 2022. About a month later the village was occupied by Russian troops Oleg Pereverzev/NurPhoto via Getty Images
“I wish he’d killed me instead”
Horrifying reports of sexual violence and rape were reported from areas previously held by Russian forces as they retreated to refocus their attack on Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region. The full extent of the atrocities is not known and may never be known.
Rudyk heard the story of a woman who was raped in front of her family members and a story where a woman was repeatedly visited and raped over many days.
“I wish he would have killed me instead of what he did,” 83-year-old retired schoolteacher Vera told CBS News senior foreign correspondent Holly Williams, who was visiting the small village in southern Ukraine where she lived shortly after the Russian soldiers had left it occupied.
Visibly shocked, Vera said a Russian fighter from Donetsk had raped her in her house and her disabled husband in the next room.
“I asked [the soldier], “What do you have against our government? We were not the ones who started the war.’ God I wish I hadn’t said that. I tempted fate. He said I was too smart,” Vera told CBS News. “He said get up. I got up. He grabbed my neck. He squeezed it. I started gagging. I couldn’t breathe He asked me who was in the house. I said just my sick old man, nobody else… and then it started.”
Vera said police told her that two other women in her small village had also been raped – another pensioner and a younger woman – and that there had been a similar case in a neighboring town that had also been occupied.
Vera said that even though the occupiers had left her village, she was petrified every night.
“I’m sad. Everything hurts. I am in a state of being neither dead nor alive.”
Putin promises that Russia’s military goals in Ukraine will be achieved as more reports of atrocities surface 05:13
Rape as a war crime
Under international law, rape during conflict can be a war crime, a crime against humanity and, when combined with the intent to eliminate a group, part of genocide.
Rudyk said Russian forces used rape as a tool to terrorize people because Ukrainians resisted the invasion so fiercely.
“They are trying to find ways to break us. Well it’s not working at the moment. It only infuriates us and drives more and more people to fight and protect our peaceful cities from this atrocity,” she said.
Rudyk said she doesn’t believe Russian troops were ordered to rape Ukrainian women, “but they were told to do what they want, which basically allows them to do that.”
Aid organizations are working to send rape kits and emergency contraception to Ukraine to meet immediate medical needs and to facilitate evidence gathering. On Wednesday, the United Nations announced a set of global guidelines on how to collect evidence from witnesses, victims and survivors of sexual violence in conflict zones.
Rudyk said that while she hopes her work will help bring about justice, sexual violence as a tool of war will endure as long as the conflict does.
“The only way to stop the atrocities is to end the war,” she said. “And every time a world organization gets together and says, ‘Ok, we’re going to make it [together] in two weeks and we’ll think about what’s happening and we’ll think maybe we’ll do something. I want you to think that there is probably a woman somewhere in the occupied territory – and there isn’t [just] First – that every single day for those two weeks I would wake up knowing what was going to happen. Russian soldiers will come and rape them. And she may not survive.”
Justine Redman and Pamela Falk contributed to this report.
In the USA there is help for survivors of sexual violence and their families. RAINN offers resources at 1-800-656-HOPE and on their website www.rainn.org
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