Anna (her name is fictitious), 50, lives in a rural area 70 kilometers from Kyiv. On March 7, she was at home with her husband when a soldier broke in. “He threatened me with guns, took me to a nearby house, said to me, ‘Get undressed or I’ll shoot you’ and started raping me,” he told the BBC. It was a thin young man, probably Chechen: “While he was raping me, four other soldiers came in. They took him with them ». Anna believes that four Russian soldiers entered the house. When she got home, she found her husband injured. He had been shot in the stomach. “He tried to run after me to save me, but he got hit.” The man died two days later. She buried him in the garden.
The woman with the cut throat
The soldiers who rescued them stayed in their house for days. They pointed a gun at her to have her husband’s personal belongings delivered: “When they left I found drugs and Viagra in the house. They got high and got drunk a lot.’ The man who raped Anna is also suspected of another rape. That would have happened before what she suffered. The other woman, a 40yearold, was taken from the house and raped in another room. Where there are now large bloodstains on the mattress and bedspread. On a mirror is written: “Tortured by unknowns, buried by the Russians.” A neighbor said Russian soldiers found and buried the woman’s body. They found her with a cut on her throat. She was also buried in the backyard. But police exhumed the body for examination.
Andrii Nebytov, the police chief of the Kyiv region, told the BBC about another case they are investigating in a village 50 km west of Kyiv. A family of three, consisting of a couple in their 30s and a young child, were attacked by Russian soldiers who shot the man in the yard. “After that, two soldiers raped his wife three times, and she resisted to protect her son,” says Nebytov. When the soldiers left, they set fire to the house and even shot the dogs.
“Why is this happening?”
Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova reported on the case of 25 girls raped in a basement in Bucha. “Nine of them are pregnant now,” she said. But there are other stories: “A 25yearold woman called to tell us that her 16yearold sister had been raped on the street in front of her. He said they yelled, “This will happen to all Nazi prostitutes” as they raped her. Anna, the woman in the opening story, left her testimony to Yogita Limaye: “I want to ask Putin: why is all this happening? We’re not living in the Stone Age, why can’t this be treated? Why does he occupy and kill? ».
Cover photo by: BBC
