According to a shocking report, a Russian woman was heard giving her husband, a soldier, permission to rape Ukrainian women – reminding him to use only “protection” in committing the crimes.
According to the Ukrainian news platform Ukrinform.net, the Security Service of Ukraine intercepted the woman’s phone call with her husband and published the audio of the alleged conversation on its Telegram channel.
The clip, titled “Wives of Russian Invaders Allow Their Husbands to Rape Ukrainian Women” — claims that it “reflects not only the moral values of the occupiers, but also their relatives, 80[%] who are now supporting the war in Ukraine.”
“So yeah, do it over there…Ukrainian women over there. Rape her, yes,” the woman is heard saying, the Daily Mail reported.
“Don’t tell me anything, do you understand!?” she adds, laughing.
Investigators begin the gruesome task of pulling bodies from a mass grave behind the Church of St. Andrew and All Saints while assessing evidence of war crimes in Bucha, Ukraine. Carol Guzy/ZUMA Press Wire
“Uh-huh. So I should rape and not tell you anything,” the husband inquires, making it clear that she gave him the green light.
“Yes, so I don’t know anything. Why do you ask?” says the woman.
“Can I really do that?” he asks again in disbelief.
“Yes, I allow you – just use protection,” she tells him with a giggle.
“Okay,” he finally says.
News of the alleged conversation comes after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russian soldiers of raping hundreds of women and also sexually abusing children.
This photo was tweeted by Ukrainian MP Lesia Vasylenko and claimed to show the torture of a slain Ukrainian woman.Twitter / @lesiavasylenko
The harrowing reports include that of a 50-year-old Ukrainian woman, who told the BBC she was at home with her husband when a Russian soldier burst in last month.
“At gunpoint, he took me to a house nearby. He told me: ‘Get undressed or I’ll shoot you.’ He kept threatening to kill me if I didn’t do what he said. Then he started raping me,” the woman told the BBC, who only identified her as “Anna”.
The woman described her attacker as a Chechen fighter allied with Russia.
“While he was raping me, four other soldiers came in. I thought I was done. But they took him away. I never saw him again,” Anna said, adding that she believes Russian soldiers arrested her comrade.
But Anna said she later found her husband shot in the stomach.
“He was trying to run after me to save me, but he was hit by a bullet,” she told the outlet.
Because of the fighting, the woman said, her husband could not be taken to a hospital and died two days later from his injuries.
Anna said the Russian soldiers who rescued her from her attacker stayed at her home for a few days, where they threatened her with their guns and demanded that she hand over her late husband’s belongings.
“When they left I found drugs and Viagra. They would get high and were often drunk. Most of them are murderers, rapists and looters. Few are okay,” she said.
A Russian soldier in Mariupol, Ukraine. ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images
Anna’s neighbors told the BBC her attacker had previously raped and killed a woman who lived nearby.
“She [Russian soldiers] told me that she had been raped and that her throat had either been slit or stabbed and she was bleeding to death. They said there was a lot of blood,” a neighbor named Oksana told the outlet.
Police found the woman’s buried body without clothes and with a deep cut on her neck, the BBC reported.
REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko
In another case, Kyiv region police chief Andrii Nebytov told the BBC that Russian forces had entered the home of a family of three – a couple in their 30s and their young child – in a village about 30 miles west of the capital.
“The husband tried to protect his wife and child. So they shot him in the yard,” Nebytov said.
“After that, two soldiers repeatedly raped the woman. They would leave and then come back. They came back three times to rape her. They threatened that if she resisted, they would harm their little boy. To protect her child, she didn’t fight back,” he added.
The bodies of dead Ukrainian women raped, killed and burned by Russian occupiers are seen on the Kyiv-Zhytomyr highway near Kyiv © Mykhaylo Palinchak/SOPA Images via ZUMA Press Wire
The soldiers then burned down the house and killed the family’s dogs before fleeing, the police chief said.
Another woman, an 83-year-old retired teacher, also described being raped in her village last month.
“He grabbed my neck. I started gagging, I couldn’t breathe,” the woman, identified only as Vera, told CBS News.
Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, said reported sexual assaults are documented.REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko
“I said to the person who raped me, ‘I’m old enough to be your mother. Would you let that happen to your mother?’ He shut me up,” she said, adding that she was also beaten while her disabled husband was in the home.
“When he was done, he grabbed a bottle of vodka. I asked if I could get dressed again. He barked, ‘No!'” she told the network.
“He should have shot me. I wish he would have killed me instead of what he did,” Vera said. “Everything hurts. I’m in a state where I’m neither dead nor alive. I used to be happy about spring, now I don’t feel anything. I have nothing.”
Vera added that she believes her attacker was from Ukraine’s Far East, a region controlled by Russian-backed separatists.
Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, said reported sexual assaults were documented, in part through information collected on the messaging app Telegram.
“About 25 girls and women between the ages of 14 and 24 were systematically raped in the basement of a house in Bucha during the occupation. Nine of them are pregnant,” she told the BBC.
Denisova said calls had been received from victims and people close to them to support the hotlines.
“A 25-year-old woman called to tell us that her 16-year-old sister was raped in the street in front of her,” Denisova said. “She said they screamed, ‘This will happen to every Nazi prostitute’ as they raped her sister.”
“Russian soldiers told them they would rape them to the point where they didn’t want to have sexual contact with men anymore to prevent them from having Ukrainian children,” Denisova said.
The ombudsman said Ukraine wants the United Nations to set up a special tribunal to try Russian ruler Vladimir Putin personally on alleged war crimes, including ordering gang rapes by his forces.