“Break the silence” so that this “invisible crime” does not go unpunished: Ukrainian victims and associations denounced in Paris the “mass rapes” by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, a “systematic policy” intended according to them to break the society of this country.
“I am a survivor (of rape, editor’s note) and I decided to talk about it because this truth could save other women from terrifying experiences,” said Iryna Dovgan, 62, during a press briefing a few days ago in Paris.
Originally from the Donetsk region, where she lived with her family, the founder and director of the NGO SEMA Ukraine says she was arrested in 2014, after a pro-Russian separatist movement took up arms against kyiv’s troops. Accused of supporting the Ukrainian army, she was arrested and subjected to “severe violence”.
Five women testified before the press, recounting the torture and sexual violence inflicted by the Russian army between 2014 and 2023.
All of them are now helping other “survivors” of rape within SEMA Ukraine, at the initiative of this press briefing alongside the association “For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours” and the “Association for the defense of democracy in Poland”.
“In Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, the mass rapes perpetrated by Russian soldiers display a desire to destroy Ukrainian society”, aiming in particular to ensure that women no longer have Ukrainian children , denounce these organizations. “These rapes, which began in 2014, number in the thousands, mainly affecting women, but also children and men, civilians or soldiers still detained in Russian prisons. »
“Torture center”
In March, two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, UN investigators documented more civilian killings, torture and sexual violence against Ukrainians.
Lyudmyla Housseïnova, a human rights activist, remained in her hometown of Novoazovsk after the occupation by Russian troops in 2014. Arrested in October 2019 in Donetsk because of her pro-Ukrainian positions, she was held captive for three years and 13 days in various separatist prisons, including a “torture center”, according to SEMA Ukraine.
“Imagine that you are in a room almost all the time in the dark, that you have been detained for three years, without seeing your loved ones, without medical help, without hygiene. Imagine search operations, dirty hands touching every part of your body,” said M.me Housseïnova, 62 years old, by video from Ukraine.
“Imagine that one day someone comes into the room and says: ‘It’s you today who is going to serve a fighter to give him pleasure.’ And all this continues now in the 21ste century, on the territory of Ukraine and Europe…”
Mme Housseïnova was released in November 2022 with other female prisoners, during a prisoner exchange.
“Thousands” of cases
Precisely quantifying the number of rapes is difficult, because NGOs “do not have access to the occupied territories”, observes Iryna Dovgan, who mentions “thousands” of cases.
For its part, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office indicates that it has recorded 301 incidents of sexual crimes “committed by the Russian occupiers” since the start of the invasion.
Russia is accused of multiple war crimes in Ukraine, which it systematically denies.
The “true scale of cases of sexual violence is difficult to imagine,” said Nobel Peace Prize winner Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Ukrainian lawyer and human rights defender. Because “many people still don’t speak” and “the Ukrainian judicial system is only beginning to establish laws” on the subject, she notes.
In the villages where SEMA Ukraine raises awareness, there previously persisted “a mentality of shame and stigmatization towards rape victims, but we are seeing changes and there is more mutual aid,” according to Ms.me Dovgan.
“Women are also more willing to speak out because the Russian aggression is not ending… and other women are at risk of being attacked: this is our cry and our call for help,” she says. .
“This sexual violence is not the consequences of the war but rather a deliberate and systematic policy which is part of a large-scale campaign of persecution against Ukrainian civilians and Ukrainian prisoners of war”, underlined during from press point Florence Hartmann.
She was spokesperson and political advisor to the Prosecutor General of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (2000-2006).
Citing Germany, which has tried cases of sexual violence in Syrian prisons, she pleads for victims to be able to refer cases to national courts in Europe, under existing mechanisms for universal jurisdiction.
“So that this invisible crime does not go unpunished, we must break the silence,” she says.