The sexual violence of the Russian army, a weapon of war to discourage resistance

A woman who reports that in March 2022 she was a victim of abuse by Russian soldiers, near kyiv (Ukraine) in March 2023.Simon Townsley (Panos Pictures/CONTACT)

My great-aunt was not born mute, but at the beginning of the second Soviet occupation of Estonia she was taken from her home and subjected to an all-night interrogation;

After that, she stopped talking.

When she came home in the morning she seemed fine, but she never said anything more than: “Jah, ära.”

(“Yes, let me”).

Her response to anything they asked her was always this: “Jah, ära.”

She never married or had children, she never had a romantic relationship.

She lived with her mother until the end of her days.

I heard that story as a child, and although the adults didn't go into detail about what had happened during the interrogations, we all guessed, including me.

Years later, after closely following the Balkan war crimes trials, I wrote a play called

Purge

and a novel of the same name.

It seemed incredible to me that, in modern Europe, there could have been camps where women were systematically raped.

I remembered my great-aunt: what had happened to her had happened again.

And right now, in the middle of Europe, it is happening again.

More information

Women and girls as spoils of war: Ukraine denounces rape by Russian soldiers in occupied areas

My great-aunt never received justice, neither she nor any of my other relatives: lands had been lost, parents, siblings and children had died, been deported or forced to flee to the West (in the case of my family, just two relatives), but who could expect justice during the occupation?

That only changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union: the Baltic countries regained their independence and began a decolonization process similar to that of the countries that had been under the rule of the former colonial powers.

Under the USSR, historical research was a strictly political discipline at the service of propaganda, but when the occupation ended, science, culture and the press were freed from the yoke of the totalitarian State and public debate became that which corresponds to a independent state.

It was finally possible to speak openly about the past, to investigate and discuss it in broad daylight.

The words regained meanings that truly reflected people's experiences: occupation could be called “occupation” and deportations could be called “deportations.”

Finally, the multiple human rights violations in Soviet times began to be investigated.

Unfortunately, the legal successor of the USSR, the Russian Federation, did not provide its help, much less apologize, and Western countries never demanded it or encouraged it to go through a process similar to that of Germany after the Second World War.

Perhaps the West did not consider him indispensable because the crimes of the Soviet era did not seem important enough to them, or at least they were not important enough to miss the opportunity to shake Putin's hand and launder the blood money that the oligarchs snatched. to the Russian people.

And, as past crimes had been ignored, Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 caught the West by surprise.

From Estonia's perspective, the war in Ukraine seems like a kind of replay of the events of the 1940s: it is as if a mysterious finger is continually pressing

replay

.

This is because Russia has been using the same manual in Ukraine as in its previous wars of conquest: terror of the civilian population, deportations, torture, Russification, propaganda, sham judicial processes, false elections, victim blaming, refugee flows, the destruction of culture.

The general astonishment of Western countries reveals, however, that they did not know enough about this manual.

That is why it is necessary to talk about war crimes, investigate them and make them permanently part of our cultural memory: if we are not aware of them, we do not know how to interpret the signs that announce them.

However, while the history of other colonial powers is part of the curriculum, Russian colonialism has simply never been discussed in Western schools, despite the fact that the countries of the former communist bloc (which, as I have already noted, also experienced the invasion of Nazi Germany) make up half of Europe.

After the Second World War, the slogan “Never again” was on everyone's lips, but it rang false to the ears of Eastern Europeans because, after the overthrow of Hitler, we continued to suffer from Russia's policy of oppression and its continuous violations of the human rights.

That motto revealed, then, that our experience did not matter in the eyes of the rest of the continent;

Therefore, incorporating it into the cultural history of Europe is a way of doing ourselves justice.

(…)

When Russia began its full-scale attack, twenty-two-year-old Ilya was with his mother and sister in their home in Kramatorsk.

They agreed to be evacuated by train, but Russia bombed the station full of civilians, wounding one hundred and ten people and killing sixty.

Ilya, his mother and his sister managed to survive and tried to flee by car, but Russian soldiers stopped them at a checkpoint and found on his mobile a dating application for sexual minorities and a photo in which he was seen celebrating the Day. of the Independence of Ukraine with the country's flag in his hand.

He ended up being subjected to sexual violence at the hands of eight Russian army soldiers who documented his actions.

He was only able to free himself from several weeks of torture thanks to the help of the Ukrainian army.

His “crimes” had been being homosexual and keeping a personal memory on his mobile phone.

Nowadays, unlike in Soviet times, it is not possible to destroy photographs, but the fear of putting loved ones at risk by having a photo on the phone makes people delete them immediately and refrain from share them, which would be a mechanism to create community.

But people don't just delete photos, but also contacts.

A friend of mine left Kiev ten days after the start of the big attack because he felt that otherwise he would have to go through Russian checkpoints, and that scared him more than the bombings: he didn't want to erase the memory of his mobile phone and knew that, even if he did so, evidence of his attachment to Ukraine could always be found on the Internet.

Many people remained in the occupied zone for the same reasons: they did not dare try to cross the Russian checkpoints, as Ilya and his family had done.

Russia has managed to condition people's behavior and alter their visual memory before, so it is doing it again.

The occupation makes evil and dangerous what was once right and perfectly reasonable.

My great-aunt, who was born into a farming family in western Estonia at the beginning of the last century, and young Ilya, from Kramatorsk, saw the light in completely different worlds;

They do not even share gender, but they have a common experience that changed their lives: both were civilians and both were victims of sexual violence carried out by Russian soldiers or officials.

In the public debate on sexual violence, the old concept still exists that it is, in a certain way, part of male instincts, which makes it uncontrollable.

However, this is not the case: sexual violence occurs because the perpetrator usually goes unpunished.

I have no doubt that those who attacked my great-aunt and Ilya took this into account, because impunity continues to exist even though many decades have passed.

Russia has been using the same weapon generation after generation, and for the same reasons: to denigrate the victims, discourage resistance and consolidate its position of power, since each victim is also a warning to the rest of the people.

Ilya continues his life in independent Ukraine and goes to therapy.

It is unclear whether his attackers will ever be prosecuted, but the fact that he has publicly recounted his experience encourages other victims of sexual violence to speak out.

In my great-aunt's world, something like this was not possible: she could not see an interview on television or the Internet that reflected what she had experienced.

In that sense, the world has improved: for a victim, knowing that other people have suffered the same as her usually helps her stop blaming herself for a fate that she shares with many other women and men throughout generations.

Sofi Oksanen

(Jyväskylä, Finland, 1977) is an essayist and playwright.

This excerpt is a preview of his book

From her Twice in the same river, Putin's war against women

, from the Salamandra publishing house, which will be published on March 14. 

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