Every day Viktoriya has to walk past the house where she was raped by a Russian soldier the same age as her teenage son.
Russian troops arrived in her two-street village near the Kiev suburb of Borodianka in early March. Shortly afterwards, she said, two of them raped her and a neighbor, killed two men, including her neighbor’s husband, and destroyed several homes.
“If you don’t think about it, you can live,” Viktoriya said in an interview in the village on a recent rainy day. “But it will certainly not be forgotten.”
She is collaborating with prosecutors because she said she wants the perpetrators to feel the “lifetime pain” they left her behind. “I want them to be punished,” she said.
Whether they ever will be is uncertain and could take years to determine. Rapes were among the many atrocities inflicted by Russian troops on Ukrainian civilians during weeks of occupation on the outskirts of Kiev and elsewhere. But the challenges of prosecuting the attacks are daunting: the evidence is limited and the victims are traumatized and sometimes reluctant to testify about their attack, if at all. The accused soldiers have largely disappeared.
Ukrainian prosecutors say they are investigating thousands of war crimes, including execution-style murders and indiscriminate bombing of civilians. Among them are “dozens” of rapes, said Kateryna Duchenko, who oversees rape cases at the Ukrainian Attorney General’s office — a low percentage that represents only a fraction of the suffering.
