Teaser for the Russian film Zarnitsa about a young woman who joins the army (fetishfilm)
The Biden administration stated about a month ago that Russia committed "crimes against humanity" during the war against Ukraine.
The Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris, warned that "everyone who committed these crimes, and their superiors who are complicit in these crimes - you will pay the bill."
The definition of "crimes against humanity" implies the continuous, widespread and systematic use of murder, rape, torture and threatened deportation by Russia during the war.
Now, for the first time, it emerges that crimes against humanity are also committed within the Russian army against the soldiers (and especially the female soldiers) who serve in it.
Female combat medics serving in the Russian army as part of the war in Ukraine are apparently being forced to become what are known as "women of the battlefield" - or rather sex, as reported by the independent news agency Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
The facts were revealed in an interview with a Russian army woman who said that male officers force women to serve them sexually and rape them continuously - and those who refuse face terrible abuse and severe worsening of conditions.
The speaker, who was identified only as Margarita, said in the interview that she spent the last two months in rehabilitation and is taking antidepressants because of the severe trauma she experienced in Ukraine.
Margarita said the service there left her suffering from constant nightmares and anxiety attacks.
"Even when I'm not alone and I'm doing something, I still see all this horror before my eyes," Margarita said, referring to the cruelty and abuse allegedly committed by Vladimir Putin's officers against the female soldiers under their command.
A female soldier doctor in the Russian army (Photo: ShutterStock, PRESSLAB)
Margarita, a single mother living in the city of Belgrade with her older children with special needs, retired from the army in 2017 after 11 years of service.
Last summer she decided to volunteer as a medic and join the fighting in Ukraine to support her family.
According to her, as soon as she arrived in Nizhny Novgorod for training, a lieutenant colonel commanding a tank battalion flagged her down and set out to make her his "battlefield wife" - an informal role reserved for female soldiers who usually cook, clean and sexually satisfy the male officers.
Margarita said she rejected the colonel's attempts to force sex on her, which continued even after the platoon was sent to fight in Ukraine.
Determined to wear her down, the colonel, according to Margarita, ordered his subordinates to create impossible living and working conditions for her.
"For a month I simply slept outside," Margarita recalled, "while others spent the nights in tents and occupied houses, I slept on the ground, next to the road, in a small forest."
Margarita said the goal was to "break" her spirit so she would agree to have sex with the commander, but she kept refusing and was therefore sent to the front line as revenge.
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Soldiers at the Victory Day parade in Red Square, Moscow, Russia, May 9, 2018 (Photo: Reuters)
According to Margarita, the medical department she was a member of consisted of seven women between the ages of 23 and 38, many of them married, who were each pressured to serve one or more officers.
"When we went there, no one, of course, knew what was going on. And when we realized - there was no going back," she said.
On one occasion, Margarita claimed that she saw an officer shoot his "battlefield wife", a medic named Svetlana, in a fit of drunkenness or jealousy.
"They made it look like the Ukrainians did it," Margarita said of the shooting incident, which left the victim permanently disabled.
"The officer shot himself in the hand to make it look like he was protecting her, and he returned from the hospital after three weeks."
Margarita said that before the shooting, the officer would hit Svetlana with the butt of his rifle in front of others.
Svetlana, who was married, called her husband who was at home in Russia and told him about the sexual relationship with the officer because she feared she might return from the war.
Another friend of hers, Alina, was "given" to the officer in September.
"They just put a fact in front of her - you will be with this officer, he likes you," said Margarita, adding that she later learned that Alina had been "transferred" between different officers and never returned to her department.
"The girl went with it," she said.
"And most of the young women just put up with it. They decided it's better to live in the 'paradise' of this war - when you have food and cigarettes."
She noted that none of the women ever tried to escape back to Russia - as it was impossible to cross the border safely and they would have put themselves at risk of being shot by Russian forces.
They abuse men too
But female soldiers were not the only ones who suffered from shocking abuse at the hands of their commanders.
According to Margarita, male soldiers who had just enlisted and refused to fight at the front were locked naked in damp, rat-infested cellars.
If that method failed, she said commanders also had a "more original" way to get their subordinates to follow orders.
"They would force the recruits to dig their graves. They would dig a hole and then be forced to lie in it," said Margarita.
"Then other soldiers, under threat of weapons, would sprinkle earth over them. Not even their heads would stick out. Then the platoon commander or the company commander would go and shoot at those graves one by one. Say hello to everyone he hit, and everyone who had already survived Crawl out of that hole like a fool," said Margarita.
"They were sent to the front. Some of them didn't come back, and many older men are still urinating on themselves."
Margarita said that she herself took care of a large number of recruits who were beaten by their comrades.
According to her, commanders allowed only those who suffered life-threatening injuries to be hospitalized.
Otherwise, they received medical treatment on the spot to avoid drawing attention to their abuse.
Some Russian soldiers, starving and desperate to escape the water-soaked trenches they had been in for weeks, shot themselves in the legs.
"When they took off their combat boots, I was just horrified. I had never seen anything like it. Their flesh was black, with dried blood clots; even the toes were no longer recognizable," she recalled.
"The only thing left for us to do was to amputate the legs."
Surprisingly, despite the shocking experience she went through, Margarita said she would be willing to re-enlist to serve in the Russian army - mainly because she is unable to make a living as a civilian.
"And I also want to help the guys, so that at least they can eat. I have a kind of sense of duty, that I left something unfinished on the battlefield," she admitted.
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