• 'They'll Give Me a Medal': The Dark Reality of Russian Troops' Alleged

    From viktor tandofski@21:1/5 to All on Tue Apr 5 00:25:20 2022
    XPost: dumb.ass.democrats.america.hating.assholes, rec.sport.tennis

    Amid mounting evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, a young
    Ukrainian mother is speaking out about what may be the first
    rape case connected to the 2022 invasion to go before The Hague:
    She says she was repeatedly raped by Russian soldiers while her
    4-year-old son sat just a few feet away.

    In an interview with The Times of London published Tuesday, the
    woman, identified only by the pseudonym Natalya, says she still
    has not been able to bring herself to tell her son that his
    father was murdered by the Russian soldiers.

    “We cannot bury him, we can’t get to the village, because the
    village is still occupied,” the 33-year-old mother said of the
    family’s home in Brovary, a suburb of Kyiv.

    It was there that she says Russian soldiers arrived on the
    morning of March 9 and, despite a white sheet hanging from the
    family’s home to indicate there were no military targets. They
    killed the family’s dog before gunning down Natalya’s husband a
    few hours later.

    “I heard a single shot, the sounds of the gate opening and then
    the sound of footsteps in the house,” she was quoted telling the
    Times. “I cried out, ‘Where is my husband?’ then I looked
    outside and I saw him on the ground by the gate. This younger
    guy pulled gun to my head and said: ‘I shot your husband because
    he’s a Nazi.’”

    After that, she said, things became only more harrowing. While
    her son sat sheltering in a dark boiler room at the home, the
    soldiers set their sights on her.

    “[One of the Russian soldiers] said ‘You’d better shut up or
    I’ll get your child and show him his mother’s brains spread
    around the house,’” she said. “He told me to take my clothes
    off. Then they both raped me one after the other. They didn’t
    care that my son was in the boiler room crying. They told me to
    go shut him up and come back. All the time they held the gun by
    my head and taunted me, saying ‘How do you think she sucks it?
    Shall we kill her or keep her alive?’”

    They brutalized her again less than a half hour later, she said,
    but she and her son managed to flee when both the soldiers got
    “so drunk” they passed out.

    “While I was opening the gate, my son was standing next to his
    father’s body but it was dark and he did not understand it was
    his father. He said ‘Will we get shot the same as this man
    here?’” she said.

    Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, announced last
    week that Ukrainian authorities had identified one of Natalya’s
    rapists, and that a warrant was out for his arrest.

    “We will find every villain and make him answer to the fullest
    extent of the law,” Venediktova wrote on Facebook.

    Natalya said the Russian commander who raped her had introduced
    himself to her by name, and she later managed to track him down
    on social media. There are unconfirmed rumors that he was
    ultimately killed by Ukrainian forces, but, she said, “I still
    do not know for sure if it is true.”

    While Natalya’s story stands out because she was able to
    identify one of her attackers, reports of rape by Russian
    marauders have multiplied since the Kremlin launched its all-out
    war against Ukraine on Feb. 24. Ukrainian Foreign Minister
    Dmytro Kuleba has said he intends to bring such cases before the
    International Criminal Court.

    And while evidence of such war-time rapes is typically difficult
    to collect, Ukrainian authorities say Russian troops have openly
    talked about systemic rape in intercepted phone calls.

    Ukraine’s Security Service released audio this past weekend of a
    man it identifies as a Russian soldier telling a female
    acquaintance about troops killing civilians and preying on women
    in an occupied village.

    “The guys in the neighboring village raped a grown woman and a
    16-year-old girl,” he can be heard saying.

    Authorities did not reveal where the Russian soldier captured in
    the recording was based.

    In another audio clip shared earlier this month by Anton
    Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, a man
    identified as a Russian soldier laughingly tells a friend about
    one of his comrades boasting about executing civilians and
    committing rapes.

    “‘And they will give me a medal for that,’” he recalled the
    soldier joking.

    https://news.yahoo.com/ll-medal-dark-reality-russian-
    113525543.html
     

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