Paul Goble
Staunton, June 25 – The UN Special Representative of the Secretary General on Sexualized Violence in Conflict for the first time ever has included Russian armed and security forces operating in Ukraine on its list of those guilty of sexualized violence in conflicts around the world.
The UN body has documented more than 300 such cases since Putin began his expanded invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, although experts say that the actual number of rapes and other forms of sexual violence by Russian forces there is far larger (svoboda.org/a/rossiyskaya-armiya-v-chernom-spiske/33788780.html).
That is because many victims are afraid or unwilling to come forward and because Russian commanders either ignore or even sanction such actions as part of an effort to intimidate the population and make it conclude that any dissent will be brutally and even illegally suppressed and that those who engage in such actions won’t be punished.
Russian forces have behaved in a similar way in the past, including in Chechnya, Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch says; but the Ukrainian situation is much larger and the willingness of women and men to come forward to report such abuse is greater than was the case in the two Chechen wars.
Nevertheless, she says, the UN figures represent only a portion of this form of inhumane violence. What is needed is a change in orders from the Kremlin not to engage in such practices. Were those to be given and then enforced, the problem would be much reduced. That they haven’t been means that much of the blame for such crimes rests on Putin and his entourage.
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