After Russian troops marched into her town, Elena reports that she was raped for hours. No one can say whether justice will ever be done for the victims. Gathering evidence in war is difficult.
Again and again Elena’s voice fails, but she still wants to tell her story: how she was raped for hours by two Russian soldiers – because her husband is a Ukrainian soldier. Elena’s report confirms human rights organizations’ fears that Russia is deliberately using rape as a weapon in the war against Ukraine.
It happened on the afternoon of April 3 in the Kherson region near the Black Sea. “Around three o’clock in the afternoon I went to a grocery store. While I was waiting in line, Russian soldiers came in and started talking to customers,” says Elena, whose real name is different. “I didn’t understand what it was about.” But then a man pointed to her and said to the Russian soldiers: “This is the wife of a military man. The war broke out because of people like that.”
The soldiers pursued them
Elena left the store and ran home, followed by the soldiers. “They came through the door behind me. I didn’t have time to pull out my cell phone and call for help,” says Elena. “Without saying a word, they pushed me onto the bed, held me down with a machine gun and undressed me,” says Elena, bursting into tears. “They hardly spoke, only sometimes they would scold me or say to each other: ‘Your turn’.”
The soldiers only let her go around four in the morning because they had to go back to work. So far, Elena has not spoken to anyone about the rape, neither to her husband nor to a doctor or psychologist. “I’m a midwife and I helped myself.” After the crime, Elena left her city, where she was the last of her family to remain. Right at the beginning of the war she brought her four children to a safe place. Her husband, who had been fighting the pro-Russian separatists in Donbass for two years, was drafted to the front. Before she fled herself, Elena wanted to bring her most important possession to safety. But that never happened, the Russian troops took the city.
Gathering evidence in war is difficult
Elena has now arrived in Zaporizhia, where thousands of displaced people from the south are seeking refuge. From there she wants to continue to Vinnytsia in the center of the country to meet her children there again. “I just want my children back,” says Elena. When asked how she is doing, she has to cry again. Elena says she’s full of disgust. “I do not want to live anymore.”
Elena’s case is far from the only one. So far, seven raped women have called the emergency number of the Ukrainian women’s rights organization La Strada. However, Alina Krywuljak, who works for La Strada, estimates the actual number of victims to be much higher. “It could be hundreds or thousands of women and girls,” she says. “Russian soldiers used sexual violence against Ukrainian women and men, against children and the elderly,” Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said this week. In a country at war, however, it is difficult to collect evidence.
Elena expects that the Ukrainian soldiers “will take revenge” when they retake the occupied territories. She doesn’t want her rapists to get away with it either. And neither did the Ukrainians who handed them over to the Russians. “I’ll point the finger at her,” says Elena. “And tell my husband about them.”
Source: Stern
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