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    #27 Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on August 1, 2022, 11:34 pm, in reply to "Project: to find 29 examples of the BBC failing 'due impartiality' in Ukraine reporting"

    #27: Stories of sexual violence against Ukrainian women from Russian forces, April 11th:





    Newsreader: 'Well, with Russian troops retreating from areas around the capital that they used to control Ukrainian forces are moving in and are uncovering more and more stories of violence used against the local women, in particular of soldiers using rape as a weapon of war. Our correspondent Nikita Lamai [?] has been speaking to some of those affected, and you may find some of the vivid descriptions of abuse in her report upsetting.'

    Reporter Nikita Lamai [?]: 'A quiet rural neighborhood shattered by barbaric violence in a village west of Kiev, a first-hand account of rape by invading soldiers. When we started talking to this woman we didn't know what we were about to hear. We're hiding her identity to protect her.

    Anonymous woman: 'Soldier entered the house. My husband and I were there. At gunpoint he took me to a neighboring house. He was ordering me, "take your clothes off or I'll shoot you here". Then he started raping me. While he was doing that four more soldiers entered. I thought I was done for but they took him away.'

    Nikita Lamai: 'She returned home to find her husband shot in the abdomen. He died two days later, she buried him in the back yard.'

    Anonymous woman: 'I found drugs and viagra that they left behind. They would get high and they were drunk. Most of the invading soldiers are killers, rapists and losers, only a few are okay. I want to ask Putin why is this happening? I don't understand. We're not living in the stone age.'

    Nikita Lamai: 'Just up the road we heard of another rape case. It's being investigated by the police. This is the house a woman was taken to and assaulted. Upstairs, the bedroom where she was later killed. It's a disturbing scene. On the mirror a message in lipstick: "tortured by unknown people, buried by Russian soldiers" it says. Out in the garden we were shown her grave. A day after we went Ukrainian police exhumed her body. The note, we're told, was left by a separate unit of Russians who found her body and buried her here. They later told a neighbor Oksana Smolenska about the dead woman.

    Oksana Smolenska: 'They told me she had been raped and that her throat was either slit or stabbed and she bled to death. They said there was a lot of blood.

    Nikita Lamai: 'We traveled 70 miles east to another village to what used to be the home of a family, a couple in their thirties and their young child. Signs of their peaceful ordinary life lie amidst the ruins. On the ninth of March Russian tanks rolled in. Two soldiers shot the man dead. The woman who lived in this house managed to escape along with her child. She called the Ukrainian police and she's given them her testimony. She told them she was raped multiple times by the two drunk Russian soldiers who killed her husband, and she said they threatened to kill her little boy too if she didn't do exactly as they said. As the soldiers left they burned down the house. The police chief has told us they've gathered evidence and planned to go to the international court. We met Ukraine's human rights ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova who's been recording rape cases.'

    Lyudmyla Denisova: 'About 25 girls and women aged 14 to 24 were raped during the occupation in the basement of one house in Bucha. Nine of them are pregnant. A 25 year old woman called to tell us her 16 year old sister was raped in the street in front of her. To calculate the number of such sexual crimes is impossible at the moment because not everyone has come to us, not everyone is willing to talk to us.'

    Nikita Lamai: 'Among the people we met there's no relief that the Russians have gone because they've left behind deeply wounded lives that might never recover.'

    *****

    No comment in the video from any Russian official to these very serious, emotive (but unverified) allegations of sexual violence, murder, drunkenness and drug abuse from Russian troops - although the drop-down menu on the youtube video does note simply that 'The Kremlin denies that its troops have committed such offences.' The BBC has no problem presenting these stories as settled fact, endorsing the view of 'barbaric violence' committed by 'the Russians' (words used by the BBC reporter herself, not those she interviewed).

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