“Like it or don’t, it’s your duty, my beauty” REPORT Unpunished Crimes: Sexual Violence of the Russian Occupying Forces Against Ukrainian Women - Instytut Pileckiego
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“Like it or don’t, it’s your duty, my beauty” REPORT Unpunished Crimes: Sexual Violence of the Russian Occupying Forces Against Ukrainian Women
Russia is systematically committing sexual violence in the temporarily occupied regions of Ukraine.
"Like it or don’t, it’s your duty, my beauty", said Vladimir Putin on the eve of his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This obscene joke came as a grim symbol of both Russia's attitude towards Ukraine and the attitude of the Russian occupation forces towards Ukrainian women. With this statement, the Russian president incited his army to rape and normalised the use of sexual violence as a weapon against the civilian population of the country under attack.
Russia is systematically committing sexual violence in the temporarily occupied regions of Ukraine. In torture chambers set up by Russia and its collaborators, Ukrainian women are being raped, tortured and brutally murdered, illegally detained and held in sexual slavery, and there are reports of rape of elderly women and teenagers.
The report of the Rafal Lemkin Centre for Documentation of Russian Crimes in Ukraine was prepared as a result of field research in the settlements of the regions of Kyiv, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, Dnipro, Kherson, Zaporizhzhya and Zaporizhzhya. In this report we present more than 60 stories of women who were victims of Russian aggression, women of different social classes, different ages, but they have one thing in common: they are Ukrainian women who happened to stay in the territories occupied by Russia and were victims of various forms of violence by the Russian military between 2014 and 2022.
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