The village in Ukraine where Russians looted, murdered and raped
Vika, 42, left, lived with her husband Vitaly. On
March 9, Russian soldiers seized her and raped her in another house on the same
street. She later escaped and found her husband. They hid in the attic of a
house belonging to a local music teacher, Viktor, 71, for a month until the
Russians had left
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/10ee62f0-ce2d-11ec-8423-5db7bbe7a364
8 May 2022
Within days of marching into a rural community,
soldiers had killed two men, raped two women and traumatised everyone else.
The Russian soldiers were young, younger than her
sons, with barely any hair on their chins, but their commander’s words were
chilling.
“My men have had some vodka,” he said. “Now they want
some entertainment.”
Vika started trembling. She suddenly understood why,
earlier that day, when the soldiers came to the house to confiscate their phones,
they had asked her to tie white fabric on her front fence.
The one they called Oleg had already started touching
her hips. She could smell the alcohol on his breath. “Hands off,” she
admonished.
“Keep silent!” he barked, dragging her out to the
street, addressing her in the familiar Russian form of you, even though, at 42,
she was twice his age.
A shot rang out from inside the house. “Are you going
to kill us?” she asked.
For 13 years, Vika and her husband Vitaliy had lived
on Dzherelna Street in a tiny quiet village about an hour northwest of Kyiv.
Seasons came and went, potatoes and corn were planted and harvested, vegetables
pickled for the harsh winter months; swallows ducked and dived to herald
summer, a stork nested on top of the electricity pole outside their home. But
in early March, days into President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian
soldiers moved in, occupying the fanciest house in the street, the one with the
solar panels, owned by people from Kyiv. For the next three weeks the area became
a living hell.
On that single lane of 37 houses, one man was killed
in cold blood in his mother-in-law’s doorway, a second was killed as he left on
his bicycle for a nearby town, two homes were destroyed by shelling, a third
was wrecked by its Russian occupiers, and Vika and another woman were brutally
subjected to the cheapest weapon known to man.
There has always been rape in war, going back to the
abductions of women by Greeks and Phoenicians recorded by Herodotus 2,500 years
ago. In recent years it has been used from Bosnia to Ethiopia as a way to wipe
out rival ethnicities or religions, seize lucrative territory or humiliate
enemies.
There has always been rape in war, going back to the
abductions of women by Greeks and Phoenicians recorded by Herodotus 2,500 years
ago. In recent years it has been used from Bosnia to Ethiopia as a way to wipe
out rival ethnicities or religions, seize lucrative territory or humiliate
enemies.
Time and again, war rape has proved particularly
prevalent when Russian troops are involved in a conflict. But although on the
night of March 8, Vika’s dead mother appeared to her in a dream and she felt
foreboding, she never imagined what was about to happen.
The next evening the soldiers came for her. There were
three of them: the commander, Oleg, 21, and Danya, who was just 19.
“I couldn’t believe what was happening” she said last
week as she recounted the events of that night. Her hands shook as she puffed
on a cigarette but defiance blazed in her eyes when she spoke of her
determination to hold the Russians to account for what they did to her.
Oleg dragged her to her neighbour’s house, also marked
with white fabric, and told her to knock. They wanted the woman who lived
there. As Ihor, the husband, opened the door, his phone rang. “You were
supposed to take their phones!” the commander shouted at Oleg.
Oleg tried to shoot Ihor but missed. The bullet grazed
the commander’s leg instead. Danya started waving his automatic around then
dragged Ihor out to the street, put his gun to his head and beat him.
“We have to go, they are taking us somewhere,” Vika
told Ihor’s wife, Anya. But the commander looked her up and down. “No, she can
stay, she is ugly,” he said.
Danya left Ihor whimpering and pulled Vika by the hood
of her sweatshirt. “You’re hurting me,” she protested as he tried to kiss and
fondle her.
A few doors down at No 25 lived Valentina, 65, with
her daughter Natasha, 41, son-in-law Sasha, 43, and their 15-year-old son.
Sasha came to the door. “Take me, not her,” he
implored. Oleg pulled out his gun. ‘I’m Russian, you’re not going to shoot me,”
Sasha pleaded. As he turned to try to close the door, they shot him in the back
of the neck .
Vika watched them kick the body away as Natasha ran
out. “Where’s my Sasha?” she cried.
The two women were dragged across the road and a few
more doors down to the two-storey yellow concrete house with the solar panels,
which the Russians had made their headquarters.
Upstairs, Oleg and others raped Natasha. Vika was left
with Danya. “Don’t you have a girlfriend?” she asked.
“Yes, she’s 17 and I’ve only kissed her on the cheek,”
he replied. “But you I’m going to keep here till I’m finished with.”
He pulled down her leggings and knickers and raped her
in the living room.
“He was telling me to do many stupid things,” she
said, shaking her head. “Then at one point he went out to fetch Oleg, so I
quickly dressed and ran to the street and back to my house.”
By then it was midnight, the houses all in darkness.
There was no sign of her husband, so she ran a couple of properties along to
the house of a kindly retired music teacher called Viktor, 71.
“Uncle Viktor,” she cried, banging on his window.
“They shot Sasha and raped me and Natasha, and where is my Vitaliy?”
Viktor told her to hide in his daughter’s room, which
was empty, as she had gone to stay with friends in another village. But Vika
ran home to look for her husband again. “I grabbed my backpack with documents
then heard him whisper, ‘Vika’. He was in the attic where we store potatoes. I
climbed up the ladder in the snow. We stayed till morning but couldn’t sleep.”
They turned up, trembling, at Viktor’s house the next
morning. Despite the risks, he let them hide there for the next month.
“I’m so old, I am not really afraid of anything, and I
was angry at what the Russians had done,” he said. Tears spilt from his eyes.
“I kept thinking of my own daughter in another village, thinking, ‘Thank God
she wasn’t here’ and praying they don’t do the same where she is.”
Vika was so afraid that whenever a dog barked or a car
passed, she ran into the chicken coop, where she thought the Russians would not
look for her.
The only time they ventured out was for one night on
March 20, when there was intense shelling between Russian artillery positions
in the nearby forest and Ukrainian forces in another village. There was a huge
explosion as one house was destroyed. They ran to the home of Viktor’s
neighbour, Katerina Ilinyehna, 75, who had a cellar. “We were all on our knees,
praying to her icons,” Vika said.
Katerina was alone apart from three cats, two dogs and
25 chickens. Her daughter and granddaughter left for Germany at the start of
the war. Her son-in-law, Tolya, had gone missing after setting off on his
bicycle to a nearby town to check on their flat.
The Russians were frequent visitors to Katerina’s
house, demanding that she cook them pancakes. “They would say, ‘Granny, give us
tea’. What could I do? They sat on my sofa with their guns.”
Finally, at the end of March the Russians were driven
out, looting motorbikes, bicycles and tools as they went.
Vira Holubenko, whose home they had occupied, returned
home to find that the Russians had broken the doors and windows, turned
everything upside down, thrown her clothes in the yard and stolen all her
potatoes and pickled vegetables. “We’ve been saving all our life to have a cosy
house,” she said. “And this is what they did to it. I don’t know what they were
looking for — money or gold. We are just simple village people, we didn’t have
anything special.”
Vika and Vitaliy hid for another week. She is
convinced the Russians will return. “I hate them so much and wish death to all
of them,” she said. “And Putin.”
A month on, such horrors are hard to imagine in what
looks like a peaceful street. Last week, Katerina and Viktor sat on the bench
in front of her house in the spring sunshine, red tulips blooming, her cats
rubbing up against them and chickens pecking around. They chatted companionably
as they always have. But Viktor keeps finding shrapnel in the garden.
Katerina’s son-in-law was found last week in Bucha morgue.
No one’s life was left untouched. Neighbours who were
left alone are suspected of collaborating.
Natasha and her son left last week for Germany after
moving Sasha’s body from its dirt grave in the back yard for a proper burial.
“She is hysterical, keeps replaying events and saying her life is destroyed and
she should have been killed instead of him,” said her mother, Valentina, who is
now alone.
Across the country, similar horror stories have been
emerging, so many that a special rape hotline has been set up by Ukraine’s
ombudsman for human rights, Lyudmila Denisova, 61. It has taken 700 calls so
far and is having to operate 24 hours. Denisova says they have had to double
the number of psychologists counselling those calling.
It is thought that these claims are just the tip of
the iceberg, as many women are scared to come forward, fearing blame, and doubting
that anything will be done. Forensic police uncovering bodies in the region say
many bear signs of rape.
Denisova looks stricken as she gives examples, which
she says keep her awake at night, such as a mother and two daughters aged 15
and 17 in Irpin. “They raped the mum for three days, then the 15-year-old, but
told the 17-year-old they wouldn’t touch her because she was ugly. The mother
and younger daughter eventually died of their injuries and the 17-year-old was
left locked up in cellar for three days with their bodies.”
Nor was it just women. “One of the most terrible
stories I heard was of an 11-year-old boy who was raped by Russians for ten
hours in front of his mum, who was tied to a chair. He didn’t speak for a
month.”
Many of the rapes were gang rapes and there are cases
where girls aged 14 to 16 have been left pregnant. Among them was a 14-year-old
raped by three Russians in front of her mother, whose doctor has advised
against abortion, arguing that it might affect her ability to have children
later.
“This is genocide,” Denisova said. “They were using
rape as a weapon — they were mostly young soldiers aged 20 25, they did it
publicly in front of other family members, and were shouting, ‘We want to do
this to every Nazi bitch in Ukraine’.”
Larysa Denysenko, a lawyer who specialises in cases
involving sexual violence, agrees. She has been approached by survivors and has
videoed their testimony in case they decide to seek justice.
“We must act or no woman will ever trust the system
again,” she said.
Among them is a 32-year-old teacher of Ukrainian
language and literature who was kept as a sex slave by an officer in Kherson,
the first city to be occupied by Russians.
One night soldiers came to her house and herded her
mother, aunt and cousin into another room at gunpoint while she was left with
their captain.
“I like you, so I’m giving you a choice,” he said. “If
you don’t want to be taken to prison with your entire family, you can stay with
me.”
She looked at him in horror as it dawned on her what
he meant. “No, that’s not going to happen,” she replied.
“It wasn’t really a question,” he said. Then he raped
her over and over, her family still in the next room.
He placed the house under armed guard. The next time
he visited, his soldiers broke the door down.
“You just don’t understand the agreement,” the captain
said. “You are mine whenever I want you, then your family will be left in
peace.”
He raped her on and off for about ten days until she
escaped in the boot of a friend’s car. She has been unable to contact her
family since. “She had left in animal panic and is convinced they have been
killed in revenge,” Denysenko said.
Ukrainian telephone intercepts suggest that the
Russians’ wives have even been encouraging them, one telling her husband “just
use protection”.
For the women and girls who survive, many say they
would rather have died. They are often made to feel that they have done
something wrong and are ostracised by communities.
The damage is far more than physical. “You have a
raped body, raped soul, perhaps a ruined house and a ruined life and will carry
the pain inside you for the rest of your life,” Denysenko said.
She suspects that the occupiers’ conduct is linked to
high rates of violence against women within Russia. “Domestic violence is not
criminalised in Russia, so is part of societal norms. They even have a saying,
‘Beat those closest to you so strangers are afraid of you’, so kids grow up
thinking its normal, and in the army it’s even worse.”
Rapes, carried out with impunity, were also common in
previous conflicts involving Russians, including in eastern Ukraine since 2014,
in Chechnya and, most notoriously, in the Second World War.
“What we are seeing in Ukraine is a terrifying echo of
the Red Army’s mass rapes committed in 1945,’ said Antony Beevor, the military
historian whose book on the fall of Berlin details how as many as two million
German women were raped. Many later killed themselves.
“Whether or not the casual savagery of Russian troops
with rape and looting dates all the way back to the Mongol invasions of the
13th century, one thing is certain. It is a deliberate weapon of terror, not
necessarily directed from above by senior officers, but certainly tolerated as
a permissible ill-discipline and release from all their resentments and
frustrations.”
This time, however, there seems a real determination
to hold the perpetrators to account.
President Zelensky has spoken of the rapes in the same
breath as torture and killing, unlike many male leaders who have tended to
regard it as a side issue.
Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International
Criminal Court has visited Ukraine, as has Pramila Patten, the UN special
representative for sexual violence in conflict. Esther Dingemans — head of the
Global Survivors Fund set up by Dr Denis Mukwege, the Nobel prizewinning
Congolese doctor who has probably treated more rape victims than anyone on
earth — was in Ukraine last week to advise on helping survivors with
counselling, legal advice and, potentially, reparations.
Many countries have offered help on evidence
collection and documentation, including the UK, which is sending a team out
this month. The British Foreign Office is the only one in the world to have a
special department on preventing sexual violence in conflict and will host a
conference in London in November.
“I’m physically sickened to hear the stories,” said
Melinda Simmons, the British ambassador to Ukraine, who returned last week to
Kyiv. “It wakes me up at night.
“All rape is brutal but some of the stories I’ve heard
take you back to medieval bestial times. You cannot believe people think they
can do this in the 21st century.”
