“I was crushed by a machine gun” … Elena’s shocking testimony of being raped by Russian soldiers

She was raped because she was the wife of a soldier Ukrainian. Elena, whose first name has been changed, tells how she discovered that she was the victim of two Russian soldiers who were raped for hours. Testimony explaining the fears of human rights organizations pointing to identities The use of rape as a “weapon of war” in Ukraine.

Every day she met in Zaporozhye, a city where thousands of displaced people were thrown on the roads by the Russian occupation of the southern Ukrainian herd, and this blonde woman came waiting for a bus in the center Vinnytsia with her four children. From the first day of the invasion, on February 24, he sent them to the Kerson region (south), far from their home on the front line against the invasion. Husband who has been fighting for two years Pro-Russian separatists in DonbassSent to the front, in eastern Ukraine, Elena explains that they were alone there to evacuate their belongings.

“This war was started by people like her.”

But because of the danger and the Russian soldiers on this trip, the vehicle was not available to evacuate their house, which is where the tragedy took place.April 3 afternoon, this mother continues. “At 3pm, I went to a grocery store. While I was waiting in line, Russian soldiers came and started chatting with the customers, ”said Elena.

“I could not hear what they were talking about, but I noticed one of the residents pointing at me and saying, ‘This is a Bandarovka,'” he recalled. The man referred to those who longed for the leader Ukrainian ultranationalist Stephen Bandera, Who collaborated with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. “This war was started by people like her,” he added. “She’s a soldier’s wife.

“Without saying a word, they pushed me on the bed.”

“I realized they were looking at me, so I quickly left the shop. I did not have time to go inside. Two Russian soldiers entered through the door behind me. I did not have time to pick up my phone to call for help or do anything,” said Elena. They pushed me on the bed, crushed me with a submachine gun and stripped me naked, “the young woman cried out in tears. Then, at four o’clock, they left because it was time for them to go and pick up their shifts.

Elena never talked to anyone about it, not even a doctor or psychologist, especially not her husband. “I was a midwife, I did first aid myself,” she says. “When I reach my goal I will find everything I need. I want to find my children.” Asked about him Physical and psychological condition, She cries again: “I hate it. I do not want to live anymore. “

Mother and daughter joint rape

The Ukrainian branch of the non – governmental organization La Strada, a women’s rights group, has so far received calls on its toll-free number “seven cases involving the rape of Ukrainian women and children by Russian occupiers.” , Estimates that “there may be hundreds, even thousands, of raped women and young women.”

The first call, from Kherson, on March 4, stated that “a mother and her 17-year-old daughter were gang-raped by three men” and that other cases had been reported in the Kyiv region “after March 12”. Out. “Russian soldiers have been involved in sexual violence against Ukrainian women and men, as well as children and the elderly,” Ukraine’s Attorney General Irina Venedikova said in a statement this week.