“Russian troops used rape as an instrument of war in Ukraine”: the horror that was exposed after the withdrawal of Putin's soldiers

When Russian troops invaded Ukraine and began to approach Kiev, Andrii Dereko asked his 22-year-old stepdaughter Karina Yershova to leave the neighborhood where he lived.

But the young woman insisted that she wanted to stay in Bucha. “Everything will be fine, there will be no war,” he replied, according to CNN.

Despite suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, Karina had a very independent spirit: “She decided how to live herself,” says her stepfather. Yershova worked in a sushi restaurant in Bucha, and hoped to graduate from college.

When Russian soldiers surrounded Bucha in early March, Yershova hid in an apartment with two friends. In one of the last communications Dereko and his wife, Olena, had with Yershova, she told them that she had gone out to buy food at a nearby supermarket.

“We didn't think that the Russians would get to such an extent to shoot civilians. We all hoped that at least women and children would not be touched, but the opposite happened,” he told CNN.

After weeks without news of Yershova, her mother posted a message on Facebook begging anyone who knew what had happened to her to contact her.

Friends told her that the images of a dead woman with tattoos similar to Yershova's - which included a rose on her forearm - had been published in a Telegram group created by a Bucha detective who was trying to identify hundreds of bodies found in the city after the withdrawal of troops Russian people in the area two weeks ago.

The police informed the family that he had been killed by Russian soldiers.

She was allegedly tortured or resisted. “She was mutilated. He was shot in the leg and then made a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. And then they shot him in the temple.”

Dereko also believes that Russian troops sexually abused Yershova. “The investigator hinted” that she had been raped, she said, according to CNN.

Lyona Krivulyak, who runs the La Strada-Ukraine national hotline — a group that campaigns against gender-based violence — told CNN that they received nine accounts of rape across the country, most of them gang rape.

“Rape is an instrument of war against civilians, an instrument of destruction of the Ukrainian nation,” he said.

“Women were taken out of the basement so that soldiers could abuse them”

In early April, Ukrainian authorities accused Russian troops present in the country of targeted sexual violence against Ukrainian women and girls, having found several bodies of naked women on the roadside not far from Kiev.

The deputy mayor of Ivankiv, Maryna Beschastna, spoke of an episode in which two Ukrainian sisters aged 15 and 16 were raped by Russian soldiers and could not hold back their tears, the Express newspaper reported.

ITV reporter Dan Rivers said that “Maryna is the deputy mayor here and has heard grim accounts of how Russian soldiers treated women in the area.”

Beschastna added to the British media that “Women were taken out of the basement by pulling them by their hair so that soldiers could abuse them.”

For his part, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky begged the West, in one of his many messages, to intervene and prevent Russia from continuing to commit further atrocities against the civilian population of Ukraine.

“In our land, evil has been concentrated. Murderers, torturers, rapists, looters. Those who call themselves the army. And that they deserve death only for their actions. I want all the mothers of all Russian soldiers to see the bodies of those who have died in Bucha, in Irpin, in Hostel.”

“What did they do? Why were they killed? What did the man who rode his bicycle do on the road? Why were ordinary citizens questioned and tortured to death in a common and peaceful city? Why were women strangled after the earrings were ripped out of their ears? How could women be raped and killed in front of their children? Their bodies tortured even after their death? Why did the tanks crush people's corpses?” , he said in giving his message.

In this regard, the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Ukrainian Parliament, Liudmila Denisova, reported that Russian troops raped minors during their occupation of the city of Bucha.

Denisova released a post on her Facebook page listing the case of at least two minors, a fourteen-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy, who were allegedly raped by the Russian occupiers.

In this context, Denisova urged the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the United Nations to investigate these facts.

“There is no place on earth or in hell where these racist criminals can hide from revenge,” said the Ukrainian MP, who insisted that rape is “strictly prohibited” by the 1949 Geneva Convention on International Humanitarian Law.

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