"If only he would have killed me" .. a Ukrainian tragedy in the eighties was raped by a Russian soldier

Her pleas did not dissuade him to stop raping her, an old woman of his mother's age, and he continued to assault her to the point that she wished she would die at that moment instead of being in this situation.

This is what happened to Ukrainian "Vera", an 83-year-old retired teacher, who was raped after Russian forces entered her village last month.

Vera, who refused to give her name and the name of her village for her safety, does not know now if she is alive or dead.

"He grabbed me by the back of my neck...I started suffocating and couldn't breathe," the Ukrainian woman who told her story told CBS News.

She told him, "She's old enough to be your mother's age. Would you allow this to happen to your mother?"

But he did not stop.

When he's done, he takes a bottle of vodka.

"He should have shot me," she says. "I wish he had killed me instead of what he did... Everything hurts. I'm not alive and I'm not dead. I used to feel joy with spring coming, now I don't feel anything. I don't have anything."

Human Rights Watch confirmed that it had documented several cases of possible war crimes by Russian forces in the occupied Ukrainian territories, including cases of repeated rape, including the rape of a woman several times and the beating of a Russian soldier.

In a report, the Guardian noted a "growing body" of evidence of the use of summary executions, rape and torture against civilians in areas under Russian control, since the invasion began more than a month and a half ago.

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