WARNING: This story contains details that are disturbing
When Russian troops invaded Ukraine and began approaching its capital, Kyiv, Andriy Dereko asked his 22-year-old stepdaughter, Karina Ershova, to leave the suburbs where she lived.
But Ershova insisted she wanted to stay in Bucha, telling him: “Don’t talk nonsense, everything will be fine – there will be no war,” he said.
With her tattoos and long brown hair, Yershova stood out from the crowd, her stepfather said, adding that although she lives with rheumatoid arthritis, she has a fiercely independent spirit: “She decides how to live.”
Yershova worked at a sushi restaurant in Bucha and hoped to get a higher education in the future, Dereko said: “She wanted to develop.
As Russian troops surrounded Bucha in early March, Ershova hid in an apartment with two other friends. In one of the last cases, when Dereko and his wife Olena talked to Ershova, she told them that she had left the apartment to get food from a nearby supermarket.
“We did not think that the Russians would reach such a point that they would shoot at civilians,” he said. “We all hoped that at least women and children would not be touched – but the opposite happened.”
As Ershova spent weeks without a word, the family desperately needed news. Her mother left a message on Facebook, asking anyone who knows what happened to her to contact.
Friends told her that images of a dead woman with similar tattoos on Ershova – which included a forearm rose – had been published in a Telegram group set up by a detective in Bucha trying to identify hundreds of bodies. in the city after Russian troops withdrew from the area two weeks ago.
Dereko says the images seen by CNN show the mutilated body of his stepdaughter. Police told the family she had been killed by Russian soldiers.
It looked like she was being tortured or fighting, he said. “They mutilated her. They shot her in the leg and then put a tourniquet on her to stop her bleeding. And then they shot her in the temple.”
Dereko also believes Ershova was sexually abused by Russian soldiers. “IN [police] an investigator hinted “that she was raped,” he said.
CNN was unable to independently verify this claim. Officials who monitored the case declined to comment to CNN due to the ongoing investigation. CNN turned to the Kiev prosecutor’s office for comment.
The depressing wait for answers from the Dereko family reflects growing anxiety amid reports of rape during the country’s war.
Ukrainian officials claim that Russian forces have sexually abused women, children and men since the beginning of the invasion, using rape and other sexual crimes as weapons of war.
Human rights groups and Ukrainian psychologists interviewed by CNN say they are working around the clock to deal with a growing number of cases of sexual violence allegedly involving Russian soldiers.
A report by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), published on 13 April, found violations of international humanitarian law by Russian forces in Ukraine, noting that “reports show cases of gender-based violence related to conflict, such as rape, sexual violence or sexual harassment. “
“Russian soldiers are doing everything possible to show their dominance, and rape is also a tool here,” said psychologist Vasilisa Levchenko, who founded a service that provides free counseling for Ukrainians suffering from war-related trauma.
Levchenko says her network, called Psy.For.Peace, has spoken to about 50 women in the Kyiv region who say they have been sexually assaulted by Russian soldiers. She told CNN that the group was dealing with cases, including a 15-year-old and her mother, who were sexually abused by pro-Russian Chechen soldiers, and the gang rape of another woman by seven soldiers – while Ukrainian detainees were forced to watch.
CNN was unable to verify the account independently.
“The weapon [rape] is a demonstration of utter contempt for [Ukrainian] people, “Levchenko said, adding that this has a far-reaching impact beyond the victims of individual attacks. them. “
Russia has repeatedly denied targeting civilians since the start of the war, a claim refuted by numerous attacks confirmed by CNN and other news outlets. CNN turned to the Russian Ministry of Defense for comment.
BREAKING MORALS
Alena Krivulyak, who heads a national hotline at La Strada-Ukraine, a group campaigning against gender-based violence, told CNN that the hotline has received nine rape accounts across the country, most of them gang rapes. .
“Rape is an instrument of war against the civilian population – an instrument of destruction of the Ukrainian nation,” she said.
Psychologist Alexandra Kvitko, who works for a trauma victim hotline run by the Ukrainian ombudsman with the support of UNICEF, said she had heard dozens of stories of sexual violence related to the conflict.
“This amount of sexual violence, this kind of brutality, has never happened before,” she told CNN.
In the five years she has been practicing, Kvitko said she has dealt with only 10 cases of sexual violence before the invasion. “I have 50 cases in a few weeks now, and it’s not just women – it’s children, boys and men,” she said.
Rape is being used to break the morale of Ukrainians, she said, “to stop people from resisting.”
Kvitko said that when a client ran into the street to stop soldiers from raping her 19-year-old sister, “a soldier came, grabbed her and said, ‘No! No!’ Look! Tell everyone this will happen to any Nazi whore. “
Any such act of conflict-related sexual violence – rape, forced prostitution, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy – is considered a war crime and a violation of international human rights law, said Charu Lata Hog, founder of the human rights organization All Survivors. A project that explores conflict-related sexual violence against men.
“Whether this is triggered in the context of patriarchal and militarized masculinity, or is pursued as a specific goal of war, or is happening because people find the population at their mercy and therefore decide to inflict further harm,” it is still a war crime, he said. Lata Hogg told CNN.
But even as Ukrainian and international prosecutors at the International Criminal Court (ICC) gather evidence of Russian war crimes, many victims of sexual violence are still reluctant to talk to officials about their trial, Levchenko said.
“All our psychologists must provide women with the contacts of the prosecutor’s office, so that when they are ready, women can seek legal help,” said psychologist Levchenko, adding that none of her clients have sought Ukrainian prosecutors so far.
Levchenko said many of the victims – women, men and children – need time to recover before speaking to authorities.
On Friday, Andriy Nebitov, a police chief in Kyiv, said his staff had confirmed only one alleged rape case so far in the region. “We have [heard] such reports from outsiders, but when we talk to women, they refuse to confirm or deny such information, ”he said.
TERRIBLE PRECEDENT
Reports of sexual violence often increase during conflict, and Ukraine is no exception.
Vladimir Shcherbachenko, director of the Eastern Ukrainian Center for Civic Initiatives (EUCCI), told CNN that the country had seen cases of sexual violence used as a weapon in 2014, when Russian-backed separatists seized territory in the east after widespread protests called for closer integration in Europe.
A 2017 joint report by Justice for Peace in Donbass and other human rights groups such as the EUCCI documented cases on both sides of the conflict, including rape and attempted rape, sexual harassment and coercion to observe sexual violence against others. “The most common form of sexual violence against women is rape,” the report added.
Lata Hogg, of the All Survivors Project, said her group has had multiple accounts of sexual violence in the past month, “and the pattern of sexual violence emerging in this context is no different from that documented in other global contexts. scale, ”including during the conflict in Chechnya.
Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, was destroyed by Russian forces in a brutal war in the 1990s and early 2000s. At the time, Human Rights Watch reported that Russian soldiers had raped Chechen women in Russian-held areas.
Psychologist Levchenko worries that the true scale of Russia’s atrocities will only become apparent when areas such as Mariupol are liberated.
In the occupied cities, Russian forces “regularly visit women’s homes, check their phones, photos, social networks,” making it impossible for women to receive rape kits or other services, said Krivulyak of La Strada-Ukraine.
“This fear of armed people sometimes makes it impossible to seek help, and this in turn makes it difficult to document facts, which leads to problems with bringing [perpetrators] before justice, “she said.
In addition to emotional trauma, “there is a very high risk of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases,” which is why medical care is so important, she said.
Shcherbachenko said EUCCI officials were helping a local official in an occupied area of southern Ukraine who had been “specifically raped to force her to co-operate”.
He said that the Russian soldiers had told her: “We will rape you again if you do not do what you have to do … For me, this shows [Russian forces are using] sexual violence such as [a] weapons. “
‘I COULDN’T SAVE HER THIS TIME’
Human rights organizations say that the victims will take on their shoulders …
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