‘Russian soldiers raped me as my son wept’
The woman whose case could be the first heard as a war crime tells The Times what happened.
Natalya spoke in a hushed voice, fearful that Oleksii, her four-year-old son, would wake and learn the terrible truth. Of why they had to flee the little house by the pine forest that his father built for them. Of what the men with guns did to her while the boy sat sobbing in a darkened boiler room. Of who the man was they left lifeless in their front yard as they fled from their home.
“He doesn’t understand much,” she explained on the phone from Ternopil, western Ukraine, where mother and son fled three weeks ago from their village near Kyiv. “In the playground here, he goes up to people and says that we had to leave our house because there was war and there were bandits in the house but that Papa stayed behind. He doesn’t know his father is dead.”
Natalya is not her real name and her son is not called Oleksii, but those are the names she has chosen to tell the story of how their lives were turned upside down by the Russian soldiers who invaded their home, stole from them and shot dead her husband before raping her repeatedly over the course of several hours on March 9.
The Ukrainian authorities have reported the systematic sexual assault of women by Russian forces since the invasion last month. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has vowed to seek justice through the International Criminal Court, following the landmark recognition of rape as a war crime in 2008. Natalya’s case may be the first test. Ukraine’s prosecutor-general Iryna Venediktova announced that the first official investigation had been opened into a woman’s alleged rape by Russian soldiers after they shot dead her husband. That woman, who remains anonymous, was Natalya.
She agreed to tell her story for the first time to The Times to dispel whispers that the reports of rape by Russian soldiers were too shocking to be true.
Natalya, 33, and her husband, Andrey, 35, lived near the village of Shevchenkove in the Brovary district outside Kyiv, where they built their first home together next to a thick pine forest. “We were planning a child and we were dreaming about our first home,” she said.
“We wanted to live closer to nature, that’s why we didn’t live in the city. My husband put his heart and soul into building the house and everything was made of natural wood and stone. We even used to go into the forest to pick litter that other people had left behind.”
Brovary was one of the early battlefields for Russian troops seeking to assault the capital, Kyiv. On March 8, after learning that Russians had entered their village, the couple hung a white sheet from their gate “to show there is just a family here and no one wants any harm”.
The next morning they heard a gunshot outside the house and the sound of the gate being broken. Coming out of the house with their hands raised, they saw a group of soldiers, one with his rifle still pointed at their dog lying dead in the yard. “They said they did not know there were people here, that they meant no harm,” Natalya said. “All the usual fairytales: ‘we thought we were going training’, ‘we didn’t know we would be sent to war’.”
Later the soldiers went looking for petrol for a quad bike they had stolen from a neighbouring property. The commander leered at Natalya, introducing himself as Mikhail Romanov, saying that if there were not a war on they would surely have a romance.
“There was another guy named Vitaly who asked for forgiveness for the dog. He said back in his home town he and his wife were dog breeders,” Natalya said. “Mikhail at that moment seemed a bit drunk. I asked them to leave, because my son was scared, he’s only four years old. I told them: ‘Can you leave? You’ve checked the house and now you are just frightening him’.”
The commander grew aggressive when he saw a camouflage jacket in Andrey’s car. He began shooting into the car, then threatened to blow up Natalya’s car with a grenade. She begged him to leave it untouched, for emergencies, but he snatched the keys and started the engine, revving it and then crashing the vehicle into a fallen tree trunk.
He abandoned the car and stomped off – but after dark there was a commotion at the gate, and Andrey went to check what was happening. He left the door open behind him.
“I heard a single shot, the sounds of the gate opening and then the sound of footsteps in the house,” Natalya said. It was Romanov, who had returned with a man in his twenties. “I cried out: ‘Where is my husband?’ Then I looked outside and I saw him on the ground by the gate. This younger guy pulled a gun to my head and said: ‘I shot your husband because he’s a Nazi’.”
Natalya called to her son to stay in the boiler room, where they had been sheltering from the shelling. “He said: ‘You’d better shut up or I’ll get your child and show him his mother’s brains spread around the house’,” she recalled, her voice fading for the first time.
“He told me to take my clothes off. Then they both raped me, one after the other. They didn’t care that my son was in the boiler room crying. They told me to go shut him up and come back. All the time they held the gun by my head and taunted me, saying, ‘How do you think she sucks it? Shall we kill her or keep her alive?’”
After some time the men left and she went to her son, who was rigid with fear and refusing to move. About 20 minutes later the men returned, and raped Natalya again before stumbling off. “When they came back for the third time, they were so drunk they were barely standing,” Natalya said. “Eventually both of them fell asleep. I crept into the boiler room and told my son we have to run away really fast.”
He followed mutely into the yard. “While I was opening the gate my son was standing next to his father’s body but it was dark and he did not understand it was his father,” she said. “He said, ‘Will we get shot the same as this man here?’”
They fled across the fields to a neighbour’s house, and then to Brovary the next day, and on to the western province of Lviv. Natalya could not bear to break the news of his father’s murder to Oleksii.
In Brovary they stayed with her in-laws, who sent her to a town near Ternopil where her husband’s sister had been evacuated.
“I could have been silent but when we got to the police my husband’s sister made me speak up and there was no going back,” she said. “I understand that many people who have been hurt would stay silent because they are afraid. Lots of people don’t believe terrible things like this happen.
“One of the women I was with afterwards messaged the village group and people were saying ‘stop making up stories’.”
She identified Romanov from social media profiles, later learning he had been accused of multiple assaults. She does not know the identity of the second rapist; only that she is the only victim who might be able to identify him. Last week she was told Romanov had been killed by Ukrainian forces in Brovary, “but I still do not know for sure if it is true”.
In Ternopil, when she takes Oleksii to the playground, “he tells the other children: ‘My favourite dog was killed.’ He still doesn’t know about his dad. Even if we go to the shop he’s asking me to buy a doughnut for him. He asks: ‘Buy a doughnut for Papa’.”
April 24 would have been the couple’s wedding anniversary. Natalya’s husband’s body is yet to be recovered. “We cannot bury him, we can’t get to the village, because the village is still occupied,” she said. Even if is liberated, she does not know if she will return. “Memories are hard,” she said. “I don’t know how I will live with all of it but my husband built this house for us. I would never be able to bring myself to sell it.”
The Times