Women as spoils of war: the systematic and coordinated rape campaign by Russian soldiers against Ukrainian girls and women

On March 13, a Russian soldier broke into a school in Malaya Rohan, a town near the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, which had been relentlessly bombed by Vladimir Putin's forces for weeks. Dozens of women and boys took refuge in the basement of the school.

The soldier arrived in the underground hall, threatened several times with shooting and ordered a 31-year-old woman to go up to the main floor of the building, locked her in a classroom and proceeded to repeatedly rape her. He forced her to perform oral sex and, while doing so, he pointed a gun at her head or directly in her face. “On two occasions, he shot at the ceiling. She said it was to give me more motivation,” said the woman in her testimony to the specialists of Human Rights Watch (HRW). When he ended his brutal attack, the soldier confessed to the woman his name and that she was 20 years old. He also said, “You remind me of a girl I went to school with.” Before he left, he grabbed a knife and cut off a lock of his hair. “To remind you,” he added.

When Russian troops withdrew from around Kiev on April 1, official reports of sexual violence, which had reached droplets during the first five weeks of the invasion, suddenly took the form of a systematic and coordinated campaign of sexual violence. Adolescent girls and young women were the main target, but so were girls and boys as young as five or six and old women up to 80 years old. Little by little, similar stories of perversion and brutality began to spread in every town or city where Russian troops passed by. In the last week there has been an exponential increase in complaints of women who dared to count the atrocities to which they were subjected.

It was also seen that the sexual assaults had an organization that far exceeded the possible individual actions of any soldier. Ukrainian Ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova reported that 25 teenagers were held in a basement in the city of Bucha and gang-raped. Nine of them are now pregnant. Dozens of bodies of naked women with their hands tied behind their backs were found in that area. Some had mutilated genitals. There were also several boys in these conditions. Another group of women who were caught helping the defense, had their heads shaved, and tortured by inserting weapons into their bodies.

“These sexual crimes... are a weapon of war to humiliate, subjugate, terrorize and force people to flee the territory,” says Marta Havryshko, a researcher at the University of Basel. “Russian soldiers are trying to send a signal to the entire community: we are the winners, you are weak, we will destroy you, so you better give up the struggle for independence.”

Rape was first recognized as a war crime in 1919, but many more wars went on before the first prosecution took place, it was against a Rwandan “warlord” in 1998. The first trial within the framework of the United Nations was for cases that occurred during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, where Serbian forces maintained “rape camps” as “an instrument of terror”. Now, investigators from different specialized agencies are working in Ukraine collecting the evidence to bring the perpetrators before an international tribunal. “These allegations must be investigated independently to ensure justice and accountability,” Sima Bahous, Executive Director of UN Women, told the Security Council.

The history of the cruelty of human beings to their peers is very long and inconceivable. One should only think about slavery. The armies have always used rape as a weapon of war. In the 20th century, these crimes began to be documented. The Imperial Japanese Army organized sex slave networks during the invasion of China. They did the same thing with the Korean women when they took over the peninsula. It also happened after the German army invaded Russia in June 1941, organized by the Einsatzgruppen (Special Action Group). The Russians responded with the same atrocity when they entered Berlin in 1945. In the next three years, there were between 600,000 and two million rapes of German women who had survived the war. American soldiers in My Lai massacred men, women and children in 1968 during the Vietnam War. And, obviously, there was no shortage of rapes. The successive wars in the Balkans documented systematic sexual abuse on all sides. In Bosnia (1992-95), there were between 20,000 and 60,000 rapes. In the war in Rwanda (1990-94) there were between 250,000 and 500,000.

In the Iraqi prison in Abu Grahib, in 2003, some of the male and female jailers were “having fun”, showing the prisoners hooded and connected to electrical cables, strapped with straps, stacked naked on the ground and engaging in simulated sexual acts. ISIS provoked a holocaust against the Yazidi minority in Iraq and sexually enslaved their women. Within the Islamic State that terrorists built between Syria and Iraq women and girls were awarded as a prize to the fighters.

The brutal phenomenon has been studied in the last hundred years by some of the most prominent researchers. In his classic “The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals”, Professor Lonnie Athens explains that “violence” is analogous to “socialization”, that is, people become the type of people they are as a result of social experiences. Some of them are “consistent and unforgettable”, “have a lasting impact”, leave “a permanent mark... regardless of your wishes”. These characteristics, specialists agree, are exacerbated when people belong to a group. The action of the herd occurs. If they don't execute it by their own motus, they are pushed by their peers. They do it in order not to be different, to belong.

Historian Joshua Fogel explains in “The Nanjing Massacre in History” that the Japanese were taught that their imperial hierarchy was at the center of world morality and that the Japanese were superior to all other peoples. The same happened in the case of Nazi soldiers. They were convinced that the “enemy” is not another human being but a “subhuman”. Therefore, raping the enemy's women does not morally imply the same criminal status as within their own society.

Walter Zapotoczny explains in his comprehensive essay “Beyond Duty: The Reasons Some Soldiers Commit Atrocities” that there are four main factors/factors that lead to some of the most horrible cruelties in history: brutalization, belligerence, violent activity and virulence. The stages are sequential. “Each stage has to be fully experienced before the subject progresses to the next, a process that can occur in a short period of time or over several years. That violence is a choice rather than a compulsion is taken for granted among the military and among the police,” Zapotoczny explained.

All these characterizations appear in the Russian forces according to the testimony of their own members who were taken prisoner by the Ukrainians. They are very young recruits subjected to brutalization through violent military training. They come from areas far from large and isolated urban centers. They have little or no formal education. They were indoctrinated and told that they were going to fight for a higher cause against enemies of the Homeland. They convinced them that they are facing Nazis who want to commit another genocide like in World War II and that they must fight to claim their ancestors who fought against the Germans. Women are their spoils of war.

The last stage, that of virulence, appears clearly in some cases as that of Karina, a 22-year-old girl from the now infamous village of Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv. She was raped for days, abandoned naked and with a bullet in the face. The brutality was such that the police refused to show the body to his parents. They delivered it to a closed drawer.

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