Kieu, Ukraine — Every day, Victoria has to pass a house raped by a Russian soldier of the same age as his teenage son.
Russian troops arrived in her two villages near Borodianka on the outskirts of Kieu in early March. Shortly thereafter, she said the two raped her and her neighbor, killed two men, including her neighbor’s husband, and destroyed several homes.
“You can live without thinking about everything,” Victoria said in a recent rainy day village interview. “But it’s certainly not forgotten.”
She is working with the prosecutor because she wants the perpetrators to feel the “lifetime pain” they left behind. “I want them to be punished,” she said.
It is uncertain if they will ever do so and it may take years to decide. Rape was one of many atrocities committed by Russian troops to Ukrainian citizens during the weeks of occupation in the suburbs of Kieu and elsewhere. But the challenge of prosecuting assault is daunting. Evidence is limited, and victims may be traumatized and hesitate to testify, even if they report assault. The accused soldiers almost disappeared.
Ukrainian prosecutors say they are investigating thousands of war crimes, including execution-style murders and indiscriminate bombing of civilians. Among them, “dozens” are involved in rape, said Kateryna Duchenko, who oversees the rape case at the Ukrainian public prosecutor’s office. This is a low percentage of suffering, which is only part of the suffering. She said the oldest victim was 82 years old.
Still, Ukrainian authorities are seeking justice for episodes of sexual violence. Last Thursday, in a separate case from Victoria, prosecutors began their first trial of rape as a war crime. At a private hearing in Kieu’s court, they accused Russian soldiers of invading the house of Bohdanivka, an eastern village of the capital, raping a woman in front of her child and killing her husband. did. The assault took place the day after Victoria and her neighbor said they had been raped in a village on the other side of Kieu.
According to news media reports, a soldier in trial, Michael Romanov, 32, was identified by investigators using social media and survivors recognized him. Julia Golbnowa, a senior Ukrainian researcher at Human Rights Watch, said she was absent, but the case would nevertheless provide important cues to victims of wartime sexual violence.
“It shows that the government is serious about prosecuting the rape case,” she said.
Russian troops withdrew from the area around Kieu, including the village of Victoria, during March. In the weeks that followed, Ukrainian authorities were flooded with reports of atrocities, according to Ukrainian supreme human rights defender Ludmila Denisowa at the time. From April 1st to May 15th, Oleksandra Kvitko, who manages the hotline, said that the psychological support hotline in her office was 1,500 from people seeking help in dealing with sexual crime, torture and ill-treatment. He said he had received the call.
A better understanding of the Russian-Ukraine war
“The mother called on her to report that her nine-month-old mother had been raped with candles,” Kvitko said. “They tied up her mother and let her watch over her.” Her mother was calling to take her child out of her window. Kvitko said it was her job to give her mother a reason to live.
The hotline registered hundreds of calls about rape, but many of the victims were in vulnerable mental health and were not ready to provide official testimony to authorities, Kvitko said.
To investigate the rape, prosecutors collect available physical evidence and take testimony from the victim. Health checks are also evidence, but if rape occurs in the occupied territories, it is often not possible to test immediately, and after sufficient time, there may be no evidence of intense sexual encounters.
In the absence of a DNA match, prosecutors will seek to rely on other forensic evidence, such as torn clothing or evidence of victim cuts or bruises.
Even if it is possible to identify the perpetrators, most of them are not in Ukrainian detention, as was the case with the Russian soldier Romanov, who was tried last week.
The Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to requests for comment on Mr Romanov’s case. He denies allegations that soldiers have committed war crimes.
Victoria, 42, and several neighbors provided the New York Times with a report of the night of the assault, provided that only their name was used. Victoria asked not to name her because there are few people in the village and her outsiders cannot identify her. She was afraid of her harassment.
On the night of March 8, Victoria said he knocked on the door. Three Russian soldiers came over drinking alcohol.
She said she had Victoria accompany her to the next house where she was planning to take another woman, but she decided she was “too chubby.”
The drunk trio took her down the village road to a third home. There a neighbor named Valentina lived with her daughter Natasha. Natasha’s husband, Olexandre. And their 15-year-old son.
When Alexandre opened the door, the soldiers sought his wife. “I am also Russian,” he protested and told them that he was born and raised in Crimea. Victoria saw her begging them to take him instead.
She said one of the soldiers shot his doorway.
Soldiers marched Victoria and Natasha with guns at the house used by the Russians as their headquarters. Victoria said her soldier, Oleg, took Natasha, and a soldier, Danya, took her. “When he was leading me there, I asked how old he was,” she said. “He said he was 19 years old.”
“I told him my son was 19 years old,” she said. The commander Oleg, who attacked Natasha, was 21 years old.
Victoria said he asked Danya if he had a girlfriend. He replied that she was 17 years old and had never had sex with her.
“He was so cruel that he treated me as a prostitute, not as a woman, not as a mother,” Victoria said. “He raped me, and in front of me, they killed Olexandre very cruelly. I hate them very much. I hope they die with Putin.”
In an interview at the entrance to the house where Alexandre was murdered, Valentina said her daughter returned early in the morning looking for her son. She couldn’t say much.
“She was like a stone, she crouched,” Valentina said.
The family buried the olexandre in the backyard near the birch saplings. Valentina bought one tree for each of her families and expected one to grow for years before her death.
Police investigators began excavating bodies a month later, and women said they wanted to lead to a trial on what had happened to them. Prosecutors confirmed that they were investigating the assault and the murder of Olexandre. Her neighbor Victor confirmed to the Times that Victoria had come to his house that night and told him she had been raped. He said she stayed until her Russians left — she was afraid that her soldiers would look for her in her house.
Natasha’s relatives persuaded her to leave the village with her son. She is currently temporarily staying in a small Austrian town where neither speaks any language. She keeps in touch with Ukrainian psychologists and fellow refugees, and she talks daily.
Her mother, Valentina, now lives alone, with the exception of goats, chickens and cats. The Russian killed her dog on March 19, 10 days before withdrawing from the village. Despite the Ukrainian conservatism and stigma surrounding her rape, she advised Victoria and her daughter to tell reporters what happened to them.
Victoria remains in the village and lives on the same road where the gun was struck. There are still signs of occupation. Outside the house near the entrance to the village, someone drew a pure white V, a symbol of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Another nearby fence was the unprofessional painted “CCCP”, an acronym for the Cyrillic alphabet of “Soviet Union”.
But along the rest of the road, the sign is an obvious appeal of mercy from Russian soldiers: “People live here.” “Children.” “Elderly.”
Victoria, as a military-aged man, said he did not want to leave Ukraine without a husband who could not leave the country until the end of the war. She said it was difficult to stay in her village because everyone in her knew what had happened to her. She believes that those who left and returned during the war blamed those who stayed for destruction.
“This war was supposed to reconcile people, and they got worse,” she said. “This war broke everyone’s spirit.”
She resumed smoking, she said she quit before the war. She is also taking sedatives. She wants her own torturer to be punished. But there is no trial that can answer the question she is still asking, she said.
“Why do they have such aggression against our people? Why did they come here and burn people out of their homes and bring sadness?”
Evelina Ryabenko Diana Poladowa contributed to the report.