The heartbreaking story of a woman raped by Russian military: “I don't want to live anymore”

With her voice broken by emotions, Elena - her name has been changed - tries to speak in spite of everything. Elected by Russian soldiers because she was the wife of a Ukrainian soldier, she was raped for hours by two of them, according to her account to the AFP.

This testimony exemplifies the fears of human rights organizations showing signs of the use of rape as a “weapon of war” in Ukraine.

Interviewed in Zaporiyia, a city where thousands of displaced persons arrive every day forced to leave their homes due to the Russian occupation in southern Ukraine, this blonde woman waits for a bus to join her four children in Vinnytsia, in the center of the country.

From the first day of the invasion, on February 24, he sent them there, far from his home in the Kherson region (south), on the front line in the face of the advance of the Russians.

Her husband, who has been fighting pro-Russian separatists for two years in Donbas in eastern Ukraine, was sent to the front and Elena was left alone to move her belongings.

But due to the danger of that journey and the presence of Russian soldiers, he could not find a vehicle to empty his house and that was when the tragedy occurred, on the afternoon of April 3, says this mother.

“Around 15 I went to a warehouse. As I stood in line, Russian soldiers came in and began to argue with customers,” he continues.

“I didn't understand what they were talking about, but I noticed that one of the inhabitants was pointing his finger at me saying 'it's a banderovka, '” Elena recalls. The man was referring to the nostalgics of the Ukrainian ultra-nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union.

“'It is because of people like her that this war broke out. She is the wife of a military man '”, added the man, according to Elena.

“I saw that they were watching me when I quickly left the store. I barely got home when the two Russian soldiers came through the door behind me. I didn't have time to pick up the phone to ask for help or do anything,” he says.

“Without a word they pushed me on the bed, placed a machine gun on me and undressed me,” says the young woman before bursting into tears.

“They hardly talked, besides sometimes treating me as' banderovka 'or saying to each other 'it's your turn'. Then, around four o'clock, they left because it was their turn to stand guard” in their camp.

Elena says she hasn't talked to anyone yet, not even a doctor or a psychologist, let alone her husband.

“I am a midwife, I did the first healings myself,” she explains. “I will find everything I need once I reach my destination. I just want to meet my children again,” he adds.

When asked about her physical and psychological state, she begins to cry again: “I disgust. I don't want to live anymore.”

The Ukrainian subsidiary of the NGO La Strada, which defends women's rights, has so far received in its green number “calls concerning seven cases of rape of Ukrainian women and children by Russian occupiers”, an official of the organization, Aliona Kryvuliak, told AFP on the telephone.

But he believes that there will be much higher numbers when the shock of the victims begins to dissipate. “There may be hundreds, even thousands, of women and girls raped,” Kryvuliak estimates.

The first call, on March 4, from Kherson, spoke of “the gang rape of a mother and her 17-year-old daughter by three men.” The other cases were reported in the Kiev region “after March 12,” he says.

“Russian soldiers committed sexual violence against Ukrainian women and men, against children and the elderly,” Ukraine's Attorney General Iryna Venediktova said in a statement released this week.

The prosecutor insisted on the need to gather evidence, although she acknowledged the difficulty of doing so in a country at war, in areas where the telephone signal or power grid is disturbed.

But it is undoubtedly a more expeditious justice that Elena imagines for her rapists and their accomplices.

“I am sure that Ukraine will recover those territories in the hands of Russian soldiers and that ours will take revenge,” he says.

“And I will point my finger at those inhabitants who pointed at me. I will show them with my finger to my husband”, he promises, without revealing what punishment would be in his opinion at the height of the crime he suffered.

(With information from AFP/by Selim Saheb Ettaba, with Ania Tsoukhanova)

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