International reporting
War in Ukraine: testimonies of rape and violence multiply
Audio 02:33
Local residents walk amid the debris of a charred Russian tank next to destroyed houses in the village of Zalissya, northeast of kyiv, on April 19, 2022 AFP - GENYA SAVILOV
By: Clea Broadhurst Follow |
Jad El Khoury
3 mins
More and more cases of rape and torture are surfacing in Ukraine, mostly perpetrated by Russian forces against Ukrainian civilians in occupied areas.
Since the withdrawal of the troops, hundreds of cases have already been listed, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky.
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From our special envoys,
Kazakh passport in hand, Konstantin was able to cross the Russian
checkpoints
of the besieged cities around Kiev.
He has, thanks to this, been able to extract more than 200 people from seven different villages.
Sobbing, he tells us that among them, some will remain etched in his memory.
This is the case of a young girl who was able to hide in her car when he had stopped in front of her house.
“
I saw her eyes, her look, she was so exhausted.
She only said two words to me
: "Save me".
She was not tall and she was 15 years old.
She told me that she had been like a prisoner, in a basement, and there was the dead body of her mother, killed before her eyes.
Russian soldiers raped her every day, there were a lot of them.
And when she passed out, they threw cold water on her face and continued to rape her.
The soldiers told her that she would not give birth to a Ukrainian baby, because after that she would never want to sleep with a man again
.
»
Konstantin also evokes the gang rape of two men from Donetsk, who left the region during the conflict in 2014. Registered on a list, the Russian soldiers found them.
“
Two men, one of them was 22, the other 26. They were raped because the Russians told them they were traitors because they had left their motherland to join the nationalists.
And for that, they had to be punished,
reports Konstantin.
The younger of the two was only a teenager, it was not he who decided to leave Donetsk.
The Russians decided he was still responsible.
They violated him all the more.
»
Aliona Krivouliak is a psychologist with Strada, a Ukrainian human rights organization.
She explains that from the start of the war, she was prepared to receive this kind of testimony.
“
The first testimony we received was on March 4, in Kherson.
A woman told us that she and her daughter had been gang-raped, in front of each other, by Russian soldiers.
In 2014, we had already had this kind of testimonies during the conflict in the Donbas.
We knew that new cases were going to occur now,
indicates the psychologist
.
It is difficult to imagine the real extent of such crimes in Mariupol, for example.
And we have no doubt that there are even more cases in the Kyiv region.
»
According to her, the victims are not yet ready to speak about what happened to them.
But the psychologist notes that more and more of them want to testify.
© RFI
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Ukraine
Womens rights
Human rights
Russia
Day to day war in Ukraine