- A Ukrainian woman said she was repeatedly attacked by Russian soldiers after they killed her husband.
- Their claims are being investigated by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office, the first of its kind.
- “This younger guy put the gun to my head and said, ‘I shot your husband because he’s a Nazi,'” she said.
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A Ukrainian woman who said she was repeatedly attacked by Russian soldiers after they killed her husband is having Ukrainian officials investigate her allegations, the first such investigation into a rape by Russian soldiers since the invasion began.
“I heard a single shot, the sound of the gate opening and then the sound of footsteps inside the house,” an anonymous woman who went by the pseudonym Natalya told the Times.
On March 9, two Russian soldiers who had earlier killed the family’s dog while walking past their home near Shevchenkove outside Kyiv returned to kill her husband, she said. “I called out, ‘Where’s my husband?’ Then I looked outside and saw him on the ground by the gate. This younger guy put the gun to my head and said, ‘I shot your husband because he’s a Nazi.'”
Natalya told the Times she told her 4-year-old son to hide in the boiler room where they were hiding. The soldiers repeatedly raped her while her son cried in the next room.
“He said, ‘You’d better shut up, or I’ll get your kid and show him how his mother’s brain is spread all over the house,'” she told the Times. “He told me to undress. Then they both raped me one after the other. They didn’t care that my son was in the boiler room crying. They told me to shut him up and come back. The whole time they were holding the gun on my head and taunted me by saying, ‘How do you think she sucks? Should we kill her or let her live?'”
Her story is one of several reports of sexual violence and rape during the invasion of Ukraine and the first to be investigated by Ukraine’s Attorney General. Earlier this month, Ukrainian MP Lesia Vasylenko spoke to British officials about the mounting reports of rape.
“We have reports of gang rapes of women. These women are usually the ones who can’t get out. We’re talking about seniors,” reported The Guardian, Vasylenko said. “Most of these women were either executed for the crime of rape or took their own lives.”
Natalya and her son have since fled, leaving behind the house her husband built for them and his body. She hasn’t told her son yet that his father died. “We can’t bury him, we can’t get into the village because the village is still occupied,” she said.
Even if Brovary District is liberated, she does not know if she will return. “Memories are hard,” she told the Times. “I don’t know how to live with that, but I still understand that my husband built this house for us. I would never bring myself to sell it.”