Team News Riveting
Kyiv, September 4
The Ukraine’s National Police have received over 93,000 phone calls from the people against the Russian military for sexual crimes.
The calls were registered in the last 18 months since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainian officials and social workers suspect that statistic could contest the actual number of cases by orders of magnitude,
Serhii Nizhynsky, the public advisor of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, said in an interview with the nationally broadcast Ukrainian Radio station that Russian troops started committing acts of sexual violence against Ukrainian civilians on the first day of the invasion, and those criminal acts are continuing unabated.
Of the formal complaints fielded by national help agencies and law enforcement over the past 18 months, Nizhynsky said, Ukraine’s national criminal investigative agency has developed and referred to court slightly more than 200 separate cases against Russian service members for sexual assault or other sexual violence-related crimes.
Ukraine’s leading newspaper Kyiv reported that according to official Prosecutor General statistics, as of August 11, 2023, Ukrainian prosecutors had opened or handed over to courts 225 cases of criminal sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers against Ukrainian citizens, of which 79 were against men, 146 against women, 13 against minors (12 girls and 1 boy).
“Most of the Russian soldiers were in various states of drug and alcohol intoxication,” Nizhynsky said. Rape or attempted rape were the most common crimes reported, he said.
