a mother and her daughter tell about two weeks of rape and terror in Boutcha

This article contains testimonials that can be particularly distressing to read or listen to, but which we believe are important for understanding the situation in Ukraine. Any links we refer to are likely to contain explicit and out-of-focus images.

These are extremely rare testimonials, collected by an RTS journalist† Perhaps the first to define to such an extent the horrors experienced by women and minors in Boutcha, Ukraine. This city where hundreds of corpses of civilians have been discovered and which has become a symbol of the violence of the Russian army.

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 house and turned her house into a hell. His daughter also wanted to testify.

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 said to them, “Do to me what you will, 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 – aged between 18 and 25 – never came alone, always in groups. “Several of them got in. I believe 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, kill everyone, my neighbors, my daughter.”

Ekatarina tried in vain to calm those she defines as ‘psychopaths’: “They kept asking me where the youths were. I told them I didn’t know. I told them that everyone had fled the city. They told me they killed and raped children.” Next to her is her 13-year-old daughter: “They asked me to watch my mother get raped…so I could learn it, they said, and so they could both use us.”

“One night they came at eight o’clock. I was asleep. They got in the bed and touched me, but in the end they went to my mother. They raped her, all eight at once.”

Ekatarina’s daughter, 38

“Suddenly their gaze would turn and they would suddenly go crazy againremembers Ekatarina. They were totally unpredictable. I really had the feeling that we had not soldiers in front of us but people who had escaped from the mental hospital. That they had been given weapons and sent to war. They are not normal.”

The mother describes these systematically drunken soldiers who fired at the gate to signal their arrival at her house, who were left swinging like garlands in her yard for hours after raping her. His daughter also did not escape this psychological torture: “One day they took me to my neighbor’s little courtyard, and the soldier said to me, ‘Look, I did that this morning. She’s the woman I killed. Blood flowed from his mouth. I waited for her to suffer before I killed her.’ I asked him, ‘Did you really do that?’ And he replied, ‘Yes, I like killing, it turns me on.’ 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 killed civilians. A soldier told us, ‘It’s 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 around – who sometimes suggest she might have avoided what happened to her, she replies: “Those who tried to resist died or were forced to watch their child raped before their very 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 crazy. I understood what I had to do.” This mother concludes by saying:I believe, but I’m not sure we survived.”