- A Ukrainian woman says Russian soldiers killed her husband and repeatedly assaulted her.
- Her claims are said to be under investigation by
Ukraine 's prosecutor general.
Officials in Ukraine are investigating the allegations of a woman who says
On Monday, The Times of London published an interview with an anonymous woman the newspaper identified as being at the center of the investigation. It said she was 33 and had lived with her 35-year-old husband and 4-year-old son near the village of Shevchenkove outside the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
The woman told The Times that on March 9 she and her husband approached a group of Russian soldiers outside their home and found that the troops had killed the family's dog. She said the troops later searched the area for gasoline, with one of the soldiers apparently apologizing for the dog's death.
After dark, she said, she and her husband again heard something outside, and her husband walked out.
"I heard a single shot, the sounds of the gate opening, and then the sound of footsteps in the house," the woman told The Times.
She said one of the men from earlier — apparently the group's commander — had returned with one other man, who appeared to be in his 20s.
"I cried out, 'Where is my husband?'" she said. "Then I looked outside and I saw him on the ground by the gate. This younger guy pulled gun to my head and said: 'I shot your husband because he's a Nazi.'"
The woman told The Times she told her 4-year-old son to hide in the boiler room where they had been sheltering. She said the two soldiers then took turns raping her as her son cried in the next room.
"He said 'you'd better shut up or I'll get your child and show him his mother's brains spread around the house,'" she told The Times, adding: "All the time they held the gun by my head and taunted me, saying, 'How do you think she sucks it? Shall we kill her or keep her alive?'"
There have been other reports of sexual violence and rape during Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but last week Ukraine's prosecutor general announced the first investigation into one of them. Earlier this month, Lesia Vasylenko, a member of Ukraine's parliament, talked to UK officials about the rising reports of rape.
"We have reports of women being gang-raped. These women are usually the ones who are unable to get out. We are talking about senior citizens," The Guardian quoted Vasylenko as saying. "Most of these women have either been executed after the crime of rape or they have taken their own lives."
The woman interviewed by The Times said she and her son ultimately fled, leaving the home her husband built for them and his body behind. She said she hadn't yet told her son that his father died. "We cannot bury him, we can't get to the village, because the village is still occupied," she said.
She said she didn't know whether she'd return even if the area were to be liberated. "Memories are hard," she told The Times. "I don't know how I will live with all of it, but I still understand that my husband built this house for us. I would never be able to bring myself to sell it."