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KYIV, Ukraine — Daily, Viktoriya has to stroll previous the home the place she was raped by a Russian soldier the identical age as her teenage son.
Russian troops arrived in her two-street village, close to the Kyiv suburb of Borodianka, in early March. Quickly afterward, she stated, two of them raped her and a neighbor, killed two males, together with her neighbor’s husband, and destroyed a number of properties.
“If you don’t give it some thought all, you may reside,” Viktoriya stated in an interview within the village on a latest wet day. “However it’s definitely not forgotten.”
She is cooperating with prosecutors as a result of she stated she desires the perpetrators to really feel the “lifelong ache” they left her with. “I need them to be punished,” she stated.
Whether or not they ever can be is unsure and should take years to find out. Rapes have been among the many many atrocities Russian troops inflicted on Ukrainian civilians throughout weeks of occupation within the Kyiv suburbs and elsewhere. However the challenges of prosecuting the assaults are daunting: Proof is proscribed, and the victims are traumatized and typically reluctant to testify about their assault, in the event that they even report it in any respect. The accused troopers have principally disappeared.
Ukrainian prosecutors say they’re investigating 1000’s of struggle crimes, together with execution-style killings and the indiscriminate bombing of civilians. Amongst them, “dozens” contain rapes, stated Kateryna Duchenko, who oversees rape circumstances on the workplace of Ukraine’s normal prosecutor — a low proportion that represents solely a fraction of the struggling.
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