It was mid-March and 16-year-old Dasha was about six months pregnant.
One of the soldiers, whom Dasha said was drunk, began to ask how many rooms there were in the house and how old the children were.
What followed is an incident that Ukrainian prosecutors say is a war crime.
While the rampant violence around Kiev has embodied the senseless brutality of Russia’s attack on civilians, dark and untold stories of their brutality are slowly emerging in small, remote villages, such as Dasha, in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region.
Those stories help paint a pattern of a Russian military pockmarked by criminal behavior and, in this case, a minor’s alleged assault on her most vulnerable.
Dasha said that when the children, a 12- and 14-year-old girl, saw the soldiers in their kitchen, they were scared.
“First he (the drunken soldier) called my mother to another room. He let her go quickly. Then he called me,” she said.
“When I came in, he first told me how he saved two people in our village – a mother with two children,” she said.
But then the soldier, whom Dasha later learned was from Donetsk and called “Blue” by other soldiers, became violent.
“He started yelling and first told me to undress. I told him I wouldn’t, and he started yelling at me. And he said if I don’t undress, he will kill me,” he said. them to DailyExpertNews.
Just then, the other soldier entered the room and warned Blue that if he carried out his apparent plan, he would run into trouble with the rest of the unit.
Blue didn’t seem to mind the warning, Dasha said, and his colleague left, telling him not to return to the unit for 30 minutes.
“When I resisted, he strangled me and said he would kill me. Then he made an unimaginable threat, she said, and told her, ‘Either you sleep with me now, or I’ll bring 20 more people.”
Dasha’s story was interrupted by her sobbing. Her mother sat next to her as she spoke, also visibly upset.
“I just remember he had blue eyes, and it was dark in there, and I didn’t remember anything,” she said.
Dasha said her perpetrator tried to attack her several times after she was raped, until two Russian snipers intervened to take her and her family to another house.
DailyExpertNews does not identify victims of sexual assault and in this case refers to Dasha under a pseudonym.
There they told her they had killed Blue, she said. Dasha later learned that was a lie when she was summoned by a Russian paratrooper in the next village to discuss her attack.
But it wasn’t a conversation, she said. Instead, it was a terrifying interrogation.
“He (the commander) used some kind of psychological tactic,” Dasha said.
“He started saying the same things the rapist had said to me, yelling at me and (that said) he would do the same thing as the rapist. I was so scared and I started crying.”
After getting upset, Dasha said that then the commander decided she was telling the truth. It is unclear what happened to Blue.
Dasha had heard other Russian soldiers say that her perpetrator had a “criminal past.” She thinks he was looking for a target.
“We were told he was going through the village,” Dasha said, “looking for someone he could… ‘a girl of easy virtue,’ as they said.”
DailyExpertNews has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry for comment.
About a week after the alleged attack, the Russians left her village.
An Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) report, released on April 13, found violations of international humanitarian law committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, noting that “reports point to cases of conflict-based gender-based violence such as rape, sexual assault, or sexual harassment.”
DailyExpertNews cannot independently verify Dasha’s shocking account, but Ukrainian prosecutors in the Kherson region said in a statement they had investigated her account.
In a statement, prosecutors said: “Thanks to the victim’s testimony and the results of a number of investigative actions, it was established in early March 2022 during the occupation of a village where there was no military facility of Ukrainian soldiers, (there were) war crimes against civilians including the rape of a minor resident of the village.”
Prosecutors declined to provide further details, citing privacy concerns.
As some parts of the country try to rebuild, the trauma of the Russian occupation continues to terrorize communities in the south. His cruelty is visible on roads, buildings and houses. But for survivors like Dasha, the trauma of that occupation will long remain beneath the surface.
