Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudswoman, Lyudmila Denisova, said that 25 girls were documented as being raped by Russian occupiers near Bucha in Kyiv during its occupation by Russian forces.
She said this in an interview with the BBC on April 12.
The girls and women aged 14 to 24 were reportedly systematically raped by Russian soldiers near Bucha. Nine of them are pregnant.
Their military rapists are reported to have told them that after they were through with them they would not want to have sexual relations anymore and would not give birth to Ukrainian children.
The Ombudswoman spoke on the phone with a 25-year-old woman who drecounted that her 16-year-old sister had been raped on the street right in front of her.
Russian soldiers were screaming: “This will happen to every Nazi prostitute,” Denisova said.
On April 12 the BBC reported first-hand testimony of Ukrainian women being raped by invading soldiers.
In a quiet, rural neighborhood 70km (45miles) west of Kyiv ,Anna (name is changed) a 50-year-old woman, told them that on March 7she had been at home with her husband when a foreign soldier barged in.
“At gunpoint, he took me to a house nearby. He ordered me: ‘Take your clothes off or I’ll shoot you.’ He kept threatening to kill me if I didn’t do as he said. Then he started raping me,” she said.
Anna described her attacker as a young, thin, Chechen fighter in the Russia forces.
“While he was raping me, four more soldiers entered. I thought that I was done for. But they took him away. I never saw him again,” she said. She believes she was saved by a separate unit of Russian soldiers. Anna went back home and found her husband. He had been shot in the abdomen.
According to Denisova, the occupiers raped an 11-year-old boy in front of his mother in Bucha. The Russian soldiers tied the woman to a chair and made her watch.
The Ombudswoman stressed that rape is strictly prohibited by Article 27 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (1949). Ton April 8 tDenisova appealed to the UN Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights Violations during Russia’s Military Invasion of Ukraine and requested an expert mission set up by OSCE participating States under the Moscow Mechanism to take into account these facts of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
The UN Security Council on April 11 held an open meeting on the maintenance of peace and security in Ukraine amid Russia’s war against the country. During it, speakers called for an investigation into violence against women during the conflict.
“This war must stop. Now,” Sima Bahous, director of the UN women’s agency, told the Council.
“We are increasingly hearing of rape and sexual violence. These allegations must be independently investigated to ensure justice and accountability.”
