Ukrainian woman says she was raped by Russian officer as son cried nearby

A Ukrainian woman has come forward with the harrowing story of how she was repeatedly raped at gunpoint by drunk Russian troops after they killed her husband – all as her son cried hiding in the next room over.

Using pseudonyms, Natalya, 33, told The Times of London that she was living with her husband Andrey, 34, and 4-year-old son Oleksii in a village outside Kyiv when the Russian invasion began on Feb. 24. They hung a white sheet outside the home they built together to show they were civilians.

On the morning of March 9, the family emerged from their house after hearing a gunshot to find a group of Russian soldiers had shot their dog. The commander introduced himself as Mikhail Romanov and openly flirted with Natalya in front of her husband.

The officer became enraged when he noticed a camouflage jacket in Andrey’s car, suspecting he was a Ukrainian soldier and wrecking it against a tree before leaving with his troops.

That evening, Andrey went outside after hearing a commotion at the gate and was shot dead. Romanov stumbled into the house with another Russian soldier, who told the trembling wife, “I shot your husband because he’s a Nazi.”

“He said ‘you’d better shut up or I’ll get your child and show him his mother’s brains spread around the house’,” Natalya recalled about how they threatened her and her hiding son at gunpoint.

“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?’”

Natalya said the Russians left and came back to rape her two more times that evening, more drunk each time.

After the soldiers passed out, Natalya grabbed Oleksii and fled. Her son did not recognize his dead father, as it was too dark outside.

The grieving mother still has not told her son that his father is dead.

Natalya is the anonymous subject of the official investigation announced by Ukrainian prosecutor-general Iryna Venediktova announced last week, according to The Times. She is currently taking shelter in Ternopil, in western Ukraine.

The victim agreed to tell her story to dispel any speculation that reports of rape by Russian soldiers “were too shocking to be true.” She was able to find and identify Romanov on social media but could not identify the second rapist.

Ukrainian authorities have reported the systemic sexual assault of women by Russian forces and plan to seek justice through the International Criminal Court, which recognized rape as a war crime in 2008.

The ICC announced that it opened investigations into alleged war crimes in the Ukraine war earlier this month.