In a long report accompanied by a video interview, the BBC journalist Yogita Limaye from Ukraine tells the drama of Anna (real name). “The BBC heard firsthand testimony and found evidence of invading soldiers raping Ukrainian women, writes the reporter. Anna tells that in her small rural village, 70 kilometers from Kyiv, on March 7, a foreign soldier broke into her house: “He pointed a gun at me and took me to another house. He said to me, ‘Get undressed or he’ll shoot. He kept threatening to kill me. Then he started raping me. The soldier, Anna says, was a young Chechen ally of the Russian armed forces.
RussiaUkraine War: Five Things You Should Know Today Tuesday, April 12, 2022
“While he was raping me, four other soldiers came in. i thought i was done Instead they took him away and I never saw him again. Anna believes she was rescued by a unit of the regular Russian army. But back home with the soldiers, she found her husband wounded, shot in the abdomen. “He tried to run after me to save me, but they shot him,” he says. The two took refuge with a neighbor; They could not leave the house to go to the hospital because fighting ensued. Her husband died after two agonizing days. Anna, who tearfully tells her story, showed the BBC the spot in the courtyard where her husband was buried.
The Russian soldiers who rescued her stopped at her house, where they stayed for a few days and took away her husband’s belongings. When they left, “I found drugs and Viagra,” says Anna. A little further down the same street, the neighbors tell of another local woman, forty, who was raped and killed by the same man, who then went to Anna’s house. In the room where she would have been killed, there are large bloodstains on the mattress and bed cover. In one corner, a mirror with a lipstick inscription: “Tortured by strangers, buried by Russian soldiers”. Oksana, a neighbor, told the BBC that the letter was the work of Russian soldiers, who found the woman dead and buried her. The grave was in the garden of the house; the day after the BBC visit the body was exhumed; he was naked, with a cut on his neck.
Another case is being investigated in a village 50 kilometers from Kyiv; according to Andrii Nebytov, head of the regional police, on March 9 a group of Russian soldiers broke into the home of a young couple, killed the protesting husband, repeatedly raped his wife and threatened to harm her young son if she resisted; Finally, the soldiers shot the dogs in the house and burned down the house. The woman then fled with her son.
“Horrible acts of sexual violence” in Bucha and other places around Kyiv under Russian occupation for a month: That’s what Ukraine’s human rights commissioner Lyudmyla Denisova said, according to the New York Times. In particular, Denisova spoke of a case in which a group of women and girls were held captive in a basement for 25 days. Nine of them would now be pregnant.