Natalja, whose real name is different, and her four-year-old son are now in Ternopil in western Ukraine. In safety. She doesn’t want to talk about what she experienced at home in a Kiev suburb in front of her son: “They didn’t care that he was crying next door,” she told the British Times. They were the Russian soldiers who shot Natalya’s husband and raped her. “He doesn’t know his father is dead,” she says.
The rape of the 33-year-old woman is not an isolated case. But she is the first to have legal consequences. The country’s attorney general has filed a lawsuit to draw attention to the growing number of attacks on women: rape is a weapon systematically used by the Russian army, according to the complaint. Victims’ accusations increased and there were also recorded phone calls from Russian soldiers, in which they sometimes brag about their actions.
war crimes
Since 2008, rape has been a war crime under the Geneva Convention, along with the intentional killing and torture of civilians, looting or starving people. The list of crimes Russian soldiers can be charged with before the International Criminal Court in The Hague is equally long: there are documented attacks on kindergartens and hospitals, and the siege of Mariupol has already caused water shortages and famine. The Public Ministry is now collecting evidence of rapes like Natalya’s; she identified one of her two tormentors through their social media profiles.
But the actions of the Ukrainian army are also being investigated. A video has recently circulated purporting to show Russian prisoners of war being shot in the legs. Whether it’s real has yet to be confirmed; however, the Ukrainian side promised to investigate it. “Prisoner of war abuse is a war crime,” said an aide to President Zelensky.
Russia will commit even more massive atrocities against Ukraine. In a profile interview, Dmitry Lyubinsky, Russia’s ambassador to Austria, said that hospitals in Mariupol and other cities destroyed by Russia were actually blown up by the Ukrainians themselves. “Ukrainians plant explosive devices. And they use the civilian population as a human shield.” This has not been proven – and Russia will likely not make representations about it in The Hague either. Moscow does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC.