Kateryna, 19, raped by Chechen fighters in Mariupol, Ukraine.
For the moment at least, Kateryna remains one of the uncounted. She retreated to her cot as researchers logging potential war crimes made their way around the refugee center where she was staying in Poland, having escaped Mariupol on a circuitous route through russia.
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WARSAW — It was just before sundown when two soldiers wearing black balaclavas burst into the Mariupol basement where Kateryna had been sheltering with neighbors since the first days of the war.
For a fleeting moment, the 19-year-old hoped the soldiers might be Ukrainian, though she knew that was unlikely in the russian-held area. She quickly realized they were Chechen fighters from Russia’s North Caucasus region, part of a force that gained a reputation for particularly harsh cruelty toward civilians who remained in the Ukrainian port city. The soldiers boasted about the superior uniforms given to their units.
They had rifles slung over their shoulders, she recalled, and they seemed drunk.
“We need to check documents,” she remembers one of the soldiers saying to the people huddled in the basement. As she rose to get hers, one of the men stopped her, put his hand to her cheek and complimented her on the definition of her nose. “He asked me what my name was,” she said. She sensed what was going to unfold.
“I’d already guessed deep down,” she later recounted.
Kateryna told that she had been sitting just inside the door to the basement, with a 75-year-old woman and the lady’s pet Chihuahua, when the Chechens entered on March 26. It was the first time any soldiers had been inside the building since the area was taken by Russian forces a few weeks earlier.
The one soldier told her she needed to come upstairs to be “examined.” The sound of shelling thundered around them, and she told him she was afraid to go up.
But he led her to an empty second-floor apartment and instructed her to bend down and rest her hands on the couch. “He showed me what I had to do,” she said. “I told him that I didn’t want to do it.”
“But he told me that he would kill me.”
She got on her knees and begged for her life.
“But he lifted me up in silence and did what he wanted,” she said.
She had few defenders in the basement that day.
She had been staying in the apartment block with her boyfriend’s family — though he had left to work overseas just before the invasion. As the weeks of subzero temperatures and food shortages continued, it was clear she had worn out her welcome. Her relationship with her own mother had long been strained, and her father had died four years earlier.
Artem, 38, an Azovstal steel plant worker she had befriended, said that when the soldiers arrived, he was at the hospital visiting his mother, who had ventured out and been hit by shrapnel from an explosion. But he corroborated Kateryna’s story, saying he later returned to the basement and heard from multiple neighbors who had witnessed her being taken upstairs.
“There were other men in the basement who could have helped her,” he said, “but they were scared as well.”
On April 25, Kateryna, Artem and three family friends made their escape, risking the journey through Russian checkpoints before crossing into Latvia and then Lithuania and on to Poland. They said they wanted to end up in Norway.
While Kateryna said she plans to report the rape someday, she also said she holds little hope of the perpetrator being punished. She never saw his face, she said, and knows nothing else about him.
“But I hope for it,” she said.
source:
https://t.me/ukrainenowenglish/10390
