The United Nations (UN) is growing increasingly concerned about Russia allegedly using rape as a weapon of war.
Several activists and human rights organisations have received calls from people, mostly girls and women, who claim they have been assaulted or raped by Putin’s troops.
One 50-year-old Ukrainian woman, using the fake name Anna, told the BBC a Russian soldier barged into her home on March 7 and made her leave with him.
She said: ‘At gunpoint, he took me to a house nearby. He ordered me: “Take your clothes off or I’ll shoot you.” He kept threatening to kill me if I didn’t do as he said. Then he started raping me.’
When a group of four more soldiers came into the house, Anna ‘thought she was done for’ but they took her alleged rapist away.
Anna returned home to discover her husband had been shot while trying to run after her.
She could not get her husband to a hospital amid all the fighting, so the couple sheltered in a neighbour’s basement.
He died from his injuries two days later and has now been buried in their back garden.
The Russian soldiers who saved Anna reportedly stayed in the couple’s house for a few days, using their guns to force Anna to give them her husband’s stuff.
She claims she found drugs and Viagra when they left.
‘Most of them are killers, rapists and looters. Only a few are okay,’ Anna said.
Neighbours said the same man raped and murdered a different woman, in her 40s, before attacking Anna.
This woman’s body was found buried – with a cut across her neck – in the garden of an abandoned house where the bedroom was completely covered in blood.
The BBC found a message written in red lipstick on the mirror, reading: ‘Tortured by unknown people, buried by Russian soldiers’.
Local woman Oksana said Kremlin troops told her they had buried a woman they found dead with her throat slit or stabbed.
Ukraine’s ombudsman for human rights Lyudmyla Denisova said about 25 girls and women, between the ages of 14 and 24, were raped in a basement while Bucha was occupied.
Nine of them are now pregnant. She claims the victims were told they were being raped so they would never want to have sex again and would never have Ukrainian children.
Similarly, the president of La Strada-Ukraine, Kateryna Cherepakha, said the human rights organisation had received calls accusing Russian soldiers of nine cases of rape, involving 12 women and girls.
But she went on to stress ‘this is the tip of the iceberg’ as many victims and survivors have not yet been able to come forward.
‘We know and see – and we want you to hear our voices – that violence and rape is used now as a weapon of war by Russian invaders in Ukraine,’ she told the UN Security Council.
The UN said last week that its human rights monitors were looking into allegations of sexual violence in the war, allegedly perpetrated by both Russian forces, Ukrainian military and civil defence militias.
Russia’s deputy U.N. Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy told the Security Council on Monday: ‘Russia, as we have stated more than once, does not wage war against the civilian population.’
He also accused Ukraine and the west of having ‘a clear intention to present Russian soldiers as sadists and rapists’.
Metro.co.uk has contacted Ukraine’s UN mission for comment.
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