- Natalya, 33, told how two Russian soldiers came to the family home near Kyiv and shot dead her husband in the front yard
- Soldiers then came into the house and raped her repeatedly for several hours
- Natalya said she could hear her four-year-old crying whilst hiding in boiler room
A Ukrainian woman who was gang-raped repeatedly for hours by drunk Russian soldiers whilst her four-year-old son hid crying in a boiler room, just moments after they shot dead her husband, has spoken for the first time of the horror she endured.
Natalya, 33, whose name has been changed, told how a Russian commander and another soldier came to the family’s home in a small village near Kyiv after dark on March 9 and shot dead her husband Andrey, 33, in the front yard.
Moments later, Natalya heard footsteps in the house, which Andrey had built years earlier, and saw the Russian commander – who told her his name was Mikhail Romanov – and a younger soldier dressed in black.
Natalya shouted to her four-year-old son Oleksii, whose name has also been changed, to stay hidden in the boiler room, where the family had been sheltering from the shelling in their home in Shevchenkove, a village just outside Kyiv.
The mother told The Times the younger soldier pointed a gun to her head and spat: ‘You’d better shut up or I’ll get your child and show him his mother’s brains spread around the house.’
Natalya was then raped over several hours by the two soldiers whilst a gun was pointed to her head, and she could hear her son sobbing in the boiler room.
‘[The younger soldier] told me to take my clothes off. Then they both raped me, one after the other,’ Natalya told the newspaper. ‘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 to my head and taunted me, saying: “How do you think she sucks it? Shall we kill her or keep her alive?”‘
After hours of the Russian soldiers taking it in turns to rape Natalya, the men left but within 20 minutes they returned and raped her again.
The soldiers came back to the family’s home for a third time to rape Natalya, but this time they were so intoxicated that they were stumbling.
They eventually fell asleep, giving Natalya time to run to her son, who was huddled inside the dark boiler room, and flee their home.
‘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,’ Natalya recalled. ‘He said: “Will we get shot the same as this man here?”‘
Natalya, who has since fled to the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil with her son, said the four-year-old still does not know his father has died, and she can’t bare to tell him just yet. The little boy still asks to buy doughnuts for his father when they go to the shops.
Natalya’s horrific ordeal is being investigated by Ukraine’s prosecutor-general Iryna Venediktova, the country’s first official investigation into alleged rape committed by Russian soldiers.
Her case is the latest in a string of rape claims levied against Kremlin troops since the invasion began.
Natalya recalled how her family had hung a white sheet from their gate in Shevchenkove on March 8 after Russian troops entered their village to show that they meant no harm and there were people there.
But a day later, on March 9, the couple had heard gunshots outside their house. The family, who walked outside with their hands raised, saw a group of Russian soldiers, one of whom had his rifle pointed at the family’s dog lying dead.
The commander, identified as Romanov by Natalya from social media posts, was among the group and became aggressive when he saw a camouflage jacket in the family’s car.
Romanov then proceeded to snatch the keys of the car and drunkenly drove the car into a fallen tree before storming off.
But hours later at night, the family heard a loud noise by their gate and Andrey went outside their home to check what happened.
Natalya recalled hearing a single shot and the sound of the gate opening before footsteps sounded in the house. Romanov had come back with the younger soldier, who said he had shot her husband because he was a ‘Nazi’ before they both repeatedly raped her for hours.
After eventually manage to flee their family home, Natalya said her sister-in-law encouraged her to report the gang-rape to police.
The grieving widow, who said she and her husband would have been celebrating their wedding anniversary next month, said her family are unable to recover her husband’s body or bury him because their village remains occupied by Russian troops.
She said that she does not know if she will ever return to her village because the ‘memories are hard’, adding that she could never bring herself to sell their home because her husband built the house for them.
Last week, a woman who escaped from the decimated Ukrainian town of Irpin on the outskirts of Kyiv accused Russian soldiers of raping women and shooting innocent civilians.
Anastasia Taran, a 30-year-old from Enerhodar who was working as a waitress in Irpin prior to the Russian invasion, claimed that conditions in the Russian-occupied town are like ‘hell’ and alleged the invaders engaged in horrific treatment of locals.
‘Irpin is Hell. There are plenty of Russian soldiers out there who just shoot people who enter private homes and, at best, just kick people out of their homes,’ Anastasia told Ukrainian outlet Euromaidan Press.
‘They rape women and the dead are just being dumped.’
Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba and opposition MP Lesia Vasylenko have both cited reports of Russian soldiers sexually abusing helpless civilians.
