The young mother assured that she was a victim of this situation because she was the wife of a Ukrainian military man.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, there have been thousands of stories of people fleeing violence. One of them was a Ukrainian woman named Elena -whose name has been changed to protect his identity-, who reported having been the victim of rape by Russian soldiers.
According to the woman’s testimony, the soldiers chose her only because she was the “wife of a Ukrainian military man”. A situation that worries human rights organizations, since they show signs of the use of rape as a “weapon”.
The woman was interviewed by the AFP news agency in Zaporizhia, a city that receives hundreds of displaced people daily, where she was waiting for a bus that would reunite her with her four children in Vinnytsia, a town located in the center of the European country.
The day the events occurred
The events reported by the woman happened on the afternoon of April 3. Elena lived alone in her house located in the Kherson region, in southern Ukraine. She was the only member of her family left in the city.
Her husband had been fighting the pro-Russian separatists in Donbas, in the east of the nation, for two years, but after the invasion he was sent to the combat front.
That day, the woman was looking for a vehicle to move her belongings in the face of the rapid advance of foreign troops.
“At 3:00 p.m. I went to a store. While I was queuing, Russian soldiers came in and started arguing with customers,” Elena recounted. “I did not understand what they were talking about, but I realized that one of the inhabitants was pointing his finger at me saying ‘it’s a banderovka’the woman recalled.
The subject referred to those nostalgic for the Ukrainian ultranationalist leader Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. According to her young mother, the man told her: “It is because of people like her that this war broke out. She is the wife of a soldier“.
Elena’s testimony
Elena said that she quickly left the store to go home, but as soon as she arrived, the two Russian soldiers entered the door behind her. “I didn’t have time to pick up the phone to call for help or do anything,” she said.
The uniformed men pushed her on the bed and pointed a machine gun at her so she would undress. “They hardly spoke, besides sometimes treating me like banderovka or tell each other ‘it’s your turn’“, he recounted.
The men left around four o’clock, as they had to return to their camp to stand guard. The young woman said that she did not speak to anyone about what happened to her, not even a doctor or a psychologist, and even less so with her husband.
“I am a midwife, I did the first cures myself”he explained. When asked about her physical and psychological state, she began to cry again: “I’m disgusted. I no longer want to live.”
A situation that repeats itself
Iryna Venediktova, Prosecutor General of Ukraineclaimed in a statement released this week that “Russian military committed sexual violence against Ukrainian women and men, children and the elderly.”
The prosecutor insisted on the need to gather evidence, although she acknowledged that it is difficult to do so due to the situation facing her country, with areas where the telephone signal or the electrical network are disturbed.
For its part, Aliona Kryvuliakmember of the NGO The Strada Ukraine -organization dedicated to the defense of women’s rights-, assured that they have received calls related to cases of rape of Ukrainian women and children perpetrated by Russian occupiers.
But Kryvuliak believes there will be much higher numbers as the shock of victims begins to wear off. “There may be hundreds, even thousands, of women and girls raped,” he said.