2024-09-11 10:56:05
Captured Russian soldier Rustam Gareyev confessed to Ukrainians how he raped and shot innocent women. He also gagged them. The testimony of the terrible acts of the Russian occupiers was published by the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office on its Telegram account.
Captured Russian soldier Rustam Gareyev confessed to Ukrainians how he raped and shot innocent women. | Video: Reuters
Sexual violence has become a common torture practice used by Russian soldiers in the occupied territories of Ukraine. It targets women, men and children. Ukrainians have charted countless cases where the occupiers used the act of rape to silence and traumatize the victims. Law enforcement agencies have recorded 292 cases of sexual violence by the Russian military since the beginning of the invasion.
The crimes investigated by the Ukrainian Prosecutor’s Office include, among others, rape, attempted rape, genital mutilation and forced nudity. Some people have been forced to witness the sexual abuse of their loved ones. The cases involve people between the ages of 4 and 82 from various regions of Ukraine, including Kyiv, Kherson, Donetsk and Zaporizhia regions.
“We found two adult women in the basement of a house on Lisná Street in Avdijivka. We didn’t know how to silence them, so we simply raped them and threatened them to stop screaming so that they wouldn’t be heard. When we were done, we found a ten-year-old girl hiding and they started raping her too, in front of the adults. That’s how we raped three boys, five girls and six women on the same day,” Gareyev admitted in his statement to Ukrainian investigators.
He described that the commander gave them an order and “they just did it”. “We attacked them, raped them, then put them against the wall and shot them,” he said.
In the past, for example, the American newspaper The New York Times brought testimonies of raped Ukrainian women. A 61-year-old pensioner from Dmytrivka described how a 20-year-old Russian soldier attacked her. “First he raped me with his fingers, then with a rifle. He laughed and laughed the whole time. Whenever I cried, he told me to keep quiet or he would kill me,” she told reporters. When he finished, she was bleeding. She couldn’t sleep for more than a year. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw Russian soldiers climbing over her fence. He still lives in the house where the attack happened because he doesn’t have enough money to move.
Many harrowing stories have also been documented in detail by The Kyiv Independent’s war crimes investigative team. For example, when the Russians entered the village of Krasnivka in the southern Kherson region about a month after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, drunken soldiers walked around asking the ages of women and girls.
One of the Russian soldiers then entered the house of a woman who gave journalists a chilling testimony about her experience. He took her into the next room, took her mother and children to the kitchen, and while they waited there, he raped the woman.
“He said that if I resisted, he would shoot me. He also threatened me with his fists. I told him I was pregnant and that I didn’t want anything, and he said, ‘Don’t be a jerk. If you don’t want to be with me, I’ll call twenty others and you’ll take turns. So choose, either with me or with them.’ “I still remember the foul smell of alcohol on his breath. I tried to push him away, even though he was drunk, he was stronger than me,” the woman described.
Ukrainian journalists managed to identify the perpetrators in the summer. The findings served as the basis for a documentary about Russian sexual violence in occupied parts of Ukraine. He Came Back is available in English and Ukrainian. The soldier’s name was Mykola Senenko and he belonged to a unit of the 109th Motorized Rifle Regiment. He has not yet been punished for his actions and according to current information from journalists, he is hiding in the area of occupied Donetsk.
In most cases, victims of sexual violence in Ukraine do not receive justice. “It is very difficult to track down the real perpetrators. Rape is the most overlooked crime and its true scale is hard to imagine,” said Oleksandra Matvyichuk, director of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, to Aktuálně.cz. She estimates that cases there are thousands of rapes because many victims prefer to remain silent for fear of stigmatization.
In addition, sexual violence is a war crime only under international law, not under Ukrainian law, The New York Times pointed out. Because of this, many victims did not receive the same legal status and financial support as victims of other war crimes. Parliament is currently considering legislation that would create a legal definition of sexual violence, while introducing measures to provide free therapy to victims and rapid financial assistance to those in urgent need.
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