The dark red billboards in the Ukrainian city of Lviv present a powerful image: Russian President Vladimir Putin is on his knees, a woman stands above him and pushes a gun into his mouth. The caption reads: “I am not a beauty for you.” It’s a furious response to Putin’s sexualized description of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where he quoted a Soviet-era punk band’s lyrics about rape: “You sleep my beauty, you’re going to have to put up with it anyway.” The country’s ombudsman for human rights, Lyudmyla Denisova, has been documenting reports of widespread rape and sexual abuse from areas occupied by Russian forces. And the details are horrifying. Denisova told the BBC that Russian soldiers told women “they would rape them to the point where they wouldn’t want sexual contact with any man, to prevent them from having Ukrainian children.” Many of those who survived are now pregnant. What’s happening in Ukraine is one of the worst large-scale campaigns of sexual violence in war since Islamic State’s attacks on the Yezidi minority in Iraq in 2014. Before that, of course, there was a long, terrible history of systemic rape in conflict, from Nigeria, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kosovo, Bosnia, Myanmar and Bangladesh. Let’s not forget the “Rape of Berlin” by Soviet soldiers in 1945, and the “Rape of Nanjing” in 1937, where the International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated that upwards of 20,000 women, including some children and the elderly, were raped during the Japanese occupation.
The similarities between Bucha and Kocho — the Yezidi village in Iraq where Islamic State fighters massacred hundreds of men and abducted many more women and girls to be sold into sexual slavery — is chilling. Soldiers separated the men, women and girls, then killed the men, dumped them in mass graves, and went on to rape and sexually assault those left in their custody. Like others before them, these soldiers were not committing random acts of depravity. Their behavior was deliberate and supported at the highest levels of defense decision making — and aimed at destroying the cohesiveness of a community, says Mia Bloom, a professor at Georgia State University and member of the global non-profit Women’s Alliance for Security.
via washington post:Rape Is a War Crime That Goes Unpunished