Russian soldiers hold Ukraine women captive for 25 days; spine chilling deets inside

War crimes examiners have come across horrific cases of sexual violence committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, which include women and girls kept in a Bucha basement for 25 days. Ukraine’s official facilitator for human rights, Lyudmyla Denisova, says nine of them are now impregnated.

Lyudmyla Denisova said she had recorded numerous cases of rape, torture and abuse by Russian military in Bucha, outside Kyiv, and in other Ukrainian towns as the full magnitude of the Russian brutality prompted calls for President Vladimir Putin to be charged with crimes against humanity.

After Moscow pulled back from northern Ukraine, evidence has surfaced of atrocities carried out while Russian forces held the town, which includes indiscriminate killings, torture and other violence against civilians.

Earlier, Russia became just the second-ever nation to be suspended from the United Nations Human Rights Council after images were put out showing bodies of civilians lying in the streets with bound hands, close-range gunshot wounds and signs of torture.

In unverified claims, Denisova said around 25 girls and women aged between 14 to 24 were “systematically” raped during the occupation in the basement of one house in Bucha, leaving nine of them impregnated.

“Russian soldiers told them they would rape them to the point where they wouldn’t want sexual contact with any man, to prevent them from having Ukrainian children,” she told the BBC.

In other cases, she said a 14-year-old girl was pregnant after being raped by five men and that an 11-year-old boy was raped in front of his mother as she was tied to a chair. She also claimed a 20-year-old woman was raped by “three occupiers in all possible ways at once” in Irpin, which Russian military partly inhabited.

“The level of brutality of the army of terrorists and executioners of the Russian Federation knows no bounds – raped children,” she wrote on Facebook.

“There is no place on earth or in hell where racist criminals can hide from retribution!”

She also made an appeal to the UN Human Rights Commission to “take into account these facts of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.”

International laws of war forbid wilful killing, rape and other sexual violence, torture and inhumane treatment of captured combatants and civilians.

Everybody who orders or deliberately commits such acts, or aids and abets them, is responsible for war crimes. Commanders of forces who knew or had reason to know about such crimes but did not stop them or punish those responsible are criminally guilty for war crimes as a matter of command responsibility.

Officials from the International Criminal Court are already working in Ukraine to collect and examine proof, and a number of countries have already handed on the case to the global court, indicating a strong push to bring such crimes to trial.

Recent reports of sexual violence also came to light on Tuesday AEST, with the BBC airing an interview with a 50-year-old woman who said she was raped at gunpoint in a rural neighbourhood about 70 kilometre west of Kyiv.

Identified only as Anna to protect her identity, she said she was at home with her husband on March 7 when a foreign soldier barged in.

“At gunpoint, he took me to a house nearby. He ordered me: ‘Take your clothes off or I’ll shoot you.’ He kept threatening to kill me if I didn’t do as he said. Then he started raping me,” she said.

According to the woman her attacker - a young, thin, Chechen fighter allied with Russia - was taken away by a separate unit of Russian soldiers when they found out the crime. Her husband was shot in the abdomen and later died.

Andrii Nebytov, the police chief of the Kyiv region, told the British broadcaster about another case being probed which involved a couple in their 30s and their young child in a small village.

“On 9 March, several soldiers of the Russian army entered the house. The husband tried to protect his wife and child. So they shot him in the yard,” Nebytov said.

“After that, two soldiers repeatedly raped the wife. They would leave and then come back. They returned three times to rape her. They threatened that if she resisted they would harm her little boy. To protect her child she didn’t resist.”

Furthermore, he said when the soldiers left, they set our house on fire and shot the family’s dogs.

Russia has repeatedly debunked targeting civilians and said images of dead bodies in Bucha were staged by the Ukraine's government to bear out further sanctions against it and foil peace talks.

Also Read: Russia-Ukraine war: Mass grave of slaughtered Ukrainian civilians found near Kyiv