This article contains testimonies which can be particularly distressing to read or listen to, but which seem important to us in order to grasp the situation in Ukraine. All links to which we refer are likely to contain explicit and unblurred images.
These are extremely rare testimonies, collected by a journalist from the RTS. Perhaps the first to define to such an extent the horror that women and minors experienced in Boutcha, Ukraine. This city where the corpses of civilians have been discovered by the hundreds, and which has become the symbol of the violence of the Russian military.
A mother agreed to break the silence, to say what she experienced: incessant rapes during the occupation of her city by the Russian army. Soldiers practically took up residence in her home and turned her house into hell. His daughter also wanted to testify.
A mother and her daughter recount two weeks of rape and terror in Boutcha – Maurine Mercier
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We will call her Ekatarina, 38 years old. She lives in a small house in Boutcha, with her 13-year-old daughter and her 75-year-old mother. His mother is too old to run away. This is why these three women had to endure the Russian occupation. His story begins like this:They asked me to kneel, says the mother. Then they said to me: ‘Your daughter is very beautiful…’ I begged them not to touch her. I told them, ‘Do whatever you want with me, but don’t touch her.’ They forced me to give them oral sex. In turn, it never ended, they marched, like on a treadmill.
To protect her daughter, this woman will be raped several times a day. For two and a half weeks, the soldiers – between 18 and 25 years old – never came alone, always in groups. “Several of them got into it. I believe that only my eyes and my ears were not violated”explains Ekatarina.
“They said to me: ‘Shut up! We were stationed in Belarus and it’s been a long time since we had a wife! So shut up!’ Otherwise, they threatened to destroy the neighborhood, to kill everyone, my neighbors, my daughter.”
Ekatarina tried in vain to calm those she defines as “psychopaths”: “They kept asking me where the young people were. I told them that I didn’t know. I told them that everyone had fled the city. They told me they were killing and raping children.” Beside her is her 13-year-old daughter: “They asked me to watch my mother being raped…so that I would learn, they said, and so they could use us both.”
“One night they came at eight. I was sleeping. They came into the bed and touched me but finally they went to my mother. They raped her, all eight at the same time.”
Ekatarina’s daughter, 38
“Suddenly their gaze would turn, and they would go mad again, all of a suddenrecalls Ekatarina. They were completely unpredictable. I really had the feeling that we did not have soldiers in front of us but people who had escaped from the psychiatric hospital. That they had been given arms, and sent to war. They are not normal.”
The mother describes these systematically drunk soldiers who fired at the gate to signal that they were arriving at her house, who remained for hours in her yard, swinging like pendulums, after having raped her. His daughter did not escape this psychological torture either: “One day, they took me into my neighbours’ little courtyard, and the soldier said to me, ‘look, that’s what I did this morning. She’s the woman I killed. There was blood flowing from his mouth. I waited for her to suffer before I finished her off.’ I asked him: ‘You really did that?’. And he replied: ‘Yes, I like killing, it excites me.’ He was 18, so 5 years older than me.”
“They showed us their night vision goggles. We understood that they could see exactly who they were shooting at, that they knew what they were doing when they were killing civilians. A soldier told us: ‘It’s not not a war, it’s terrorism, it’s psychological torture. That way your President Zelensky will eventually understand who we are!'”
To the whisperers – those men in the neighborhood who sometimes hint that she might have been able to avoid what happened to her – she replies: “Those who tried to resist either died or were forced to watch their child being raped before their eyes. I don’t even know how it is possible to see this. I looked these men straight in the eye. They were dead drunk and mad. I understood what I had to do.” This mother concludes by saying:I believe but I’m not sure we survived.”