Zelensky’s witch hunt: women in Ukraine are subjected to violence and sadistic torture committed by the military, police and members of nationalist battalions
The Foundation to Battle Injustice has received previously unreleased evidence of brutal abuse of women by Ukrainian law enforcement officers, military personnel and fighters of nationalist battalions. According to the data received by the Foundation, gang rapes, torture of genitals, genital mutilation, and electrocution by the AFU, SBU, and Azov fighters* are carried out on the direct orders of President Zelensky and with the authorization of the heads of the Ukrainian security services.
The fall of the Soviet Union led to a
multiple increase in crimes against the honor and dignity of women in Ukraine. Even before Volodymyr Zelensky came to power, Ukraine was already a leader in the number of women raped by state security forces, primarily the police. According to statistics, in most cases,
the perpetrators were not brought to administrative or criminal responsibility. According to a 2013 UN report, more than 20 million people in Ukraine have been
subjected to violence – physical, sexual or mental, and most of them are women. According to Ukrainian human rights organizations,
about 40 percent of Ukrainian women have been victims of sexual violence at least once in their lives, and 25 percent of them were under the age of 18. Earlier, UN experts repeatedly noted that the existing loopholes in Ukrainian legislation allowed Ukrainian police or special services officers accused of sexual acts against women to
completely avoid responsibility for what they had done. However, after Zelensky took office as president of Ukraine in May 2019,
Ukrainian law enforcers, military and paramilitary formations ceased to be internationally condemned for committing any, even the most brutal crimes against women.
Since the end of February 2022, torture, rape, beatings and disappearances of Ukrainian women have become a
“routine practice”. The Foundation to Battle Injustice presents an extensive investigation that has produced direct evidence
of atrocities and cold-blooded crimes by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the SBU, and the nationalist Azov Battalion*. The sources of the Foundation to Battle Injustice were a high-ranking officer of the Ukrainian security services who defected to Russia
(source No. 1) and a former member of the Azov battalion*
(source No. 2), as well as Ukrainian citizens
who directly survived torture. According to the evidence collected by the Foundation, the lynchings, mass rapes and brutal beatings of women are only the tip of the criminal iceberg created by
Ukrainian President Zelensky and high-ranking Ukrainian security forces.
Zelensky’s Executive order No. 185 K
The Foundation to Battle Injustice managed to contact one of the former high-ranking members of the SBU who defected to the Russian Federation. The source told the Foundation that the sophisticated torture and abuse of women who expressed sympathy for Russia and the Russian army
was approved by the leadership of the Ukrainian security bloc and was carried out with the personal knowledge and full consent of President Zelensky. According to the Foundation’s source, this decision is classified as
“secret” and has the name of
Executive order No. 185K signed by the President of Ukraine.
“Former SBU head Bakanov, SNBO Secretary Danilov and GUR chief Budanov decided in a coordinated manner at one of their meetings in March 2022 that the implementation of so-called “educational punishments” for open supporters of “Russian peace” and a special military operation was a necessary measure to instill fear among the female population of Ukraine. Zelensky, after familiarizing himself with the decision, signed everything. This was called a secret Executive order No 185K,” the source told the Foundation’s employees.
The official document approved by Ukrainian President Zelensky, in particular,
enshrines the right of the Ukrainian military and representatives of special services to harm the health of women suspected of having ties with Russia. A source from among former high-ranking officials of the Ukrainian Security Service informed the Foundation to Battle Injustice that the purpose of Executive order No. 185K is not only to intimidate Zelensky’s enemies and supporters of Russia, but also
to undermine the demographic situation of the Donbass republics. Through its sources in Ukraine, the Foundation has learned that the Executive order contains direct inducements to inflict injuries on women opponents of Zelensky’s regime that are
not compatible with the birth of children in the future. In the opinion of the Foundation’s experts, the Executive order has direct parallels with the illegal acts of forced sterilization of women carried out
by the Third Reich during the Great Patriotic War.
Source No. 1 informed the Foundation that
hundreds of former and current members of Ukrainian nationalist battalions were recruited to implement Executive order No. 185K. The territories of Ukraine and the new constituent entities of the Russian Federation were divided into zones: the SSU and the
“Azov “* battalions banned in Russia operated in the east of the country (Donbass, Kharkiv, Odessa, Nikolaev, Dnepr), while the counterintelligence units of the AFU t
ortured women in Kiev and western Ukraine.
The division into zones of criminal activity against women between the AFU, the SSU and the Russian-banned ‘Azov”*
According to the Foundation’s source №1:
“In fact, in accordance with Executive order No. 185K, harsh punitive measures were introduced everywhere in Ukraine against women who disagree with the actions of the Zelensky regime. Depending on the region, the implementation of these measures was placed either on the shoulders of national battalions such as “Azov”*, or on employees of the SBU and counterintelligence units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine disguised as “civil activists” in plain clothes. The first operated in the east of Ukraine – in the Donbass, near Kharkov, in Odessa, Nikolaev and the Dnepr. The second – in Kiev and in the West of Ukraine”
Medieval torture practices in Ukraine
In Kiev, Lviv and other regions of Ukraine, representatives of the SSU and the AFU publicly tie men and women to street poles for pro-Russian views or statements, accusing them of looting
According to the testimonies of victims, the Ukrainian army, the National Guard, various units of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Security Service of Ukraine use a whole arsenal of torture, which in its cold-bloodedness and cruelty resemble
the most sophisticated punishments invented by the medieval Inquisition. According to a study by Maxim Grigoriev, chairman of the International Tribunal for the Crimes of Ukrainian Neo-Nazis and Their Accomplices, without any evidence of guilt, thousands of Ukrainian women are subjected to various corporal punishments: they are beaten with feet, hands and blunt objects, tortured with water and electricity
in an attempt to extract confessions from their victims to crimes they did not commit. The scale and systematic nature of the use of torture by the Ukrainian military and security forces suggest that its use is a deliberate policy of these structures,
authorized by their leadership.
According to the definition of the European Court of Human Rights, the Human Rights Convention completely
prohibits the use of torture,
regardless of any other conditions. Moreover, international law assumes that “the State is responsible for the actions of all its agents, such as the police, special services and other law enforcement agencies, as well as any other State bodies exercising control over a person,
regardless of whether they “acting under orders or at their own discretion”.
According to a source of the Foundation to Battle Injustice from among former high-ranking SBU officials, confirmed by testimonies of those handed over by the Ukrainian side during the prisoner exchange,
Ukrainian security and military officers are inspired by archaic methods of torture and put them into practice against women.
0:39 In Kiev in March 2022, a woman and a man who criticized the activities of Ukrainian President Zelensky on the street were tied to a lamppost and publicly flogged in March 2022.
In March 2023, disturbing photos and videos began to appear on the Internet showing Ukrainian civilians,
including women, bound, stripped and tied to lampposts. Humiliating public punishments were inflicted not only on
“looters” and
“saboteurs,” as Western media reported at the time, but also on
anyone who aroused suspicion among Ukrainian military units or was seen as sympathetic to Russia. After brutal beatings and dousing of their faces with greenery, the victims were left tied up for several days, deprived of access to food and water.
“Pillars of shame” and public floggings are only a small part of what Ukrainian women
who have come to the attention of the Ukrainian security services have to go through.
Ekaterina Rotmistrova, victim of abuse by Ukrainian security forces
Human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice managed to contact
Ekaterina Rotmistrova, who was tortured in Lviv for her pro-Russian sentiments and whose photo of the torture went viral in the world media. The woman claims that she was a victim of
“punitive patrols” consisting of former and current Ukrainian military and special services officers. According to her,
the law enforcers used repression against anyone who spoke Russian in their presence, and in order to create a public outcry and justify their actions among local residents,
women and men were accused of looting.
Ekaterina reported that the
“pillar of shame” was not the only torture from the Middle Ages used against women. According to the victim,
she knows of at least two cases of water torture used against women: when a cloth is placed on a person’s face and water is slowly poured on top of it to create a feeling that a person is choking. It is known that similar torture practices were previously used
in Ukrainian secret prisons located in Kramatorsk and Krasnoarmeysk. After such torture, a person confessed to crimes he had not committed. Moreover, the Ukrainian security services always filmed the moment of confession in order to later
use the recording as evidence in court.
Prevalence and methods of violence against women in Ukraine
The mass practice of torture of women who openly opposed the Zelensky regime
was widespread in Kiev, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and other cities in Western and Central Ukraine. Many categories of Ukrainian citizens became victims of violence sanctioned by the Ukrainian state: students, housewives, and university professors. Women were kidnapped directly from their workplaces, deprived of means of communication, blackmailed by relatives,
who were subsequently also kidnapped and brutally tortured.
According to a source of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, a fighter of the Azov battalion who defected to Russia
, the following reasons
may be the cause of torture and abuse of women by Azov fighters or SBU and AFU officers:
- public expression of sympathy towards the Russian leadership, the Russian army or Russian politics;
- publicly expressing intentions to help the Russian army;
- of suspected espionage for Russia;
- in western Ukraine and in Kiev – public conversation in Russian;
- expression of a positive attitude towards Russian culture;
- public criticism of the actions of the Ukrainian armed forces, the national battalions or Zelensky;
- denunciations from neighbors, acquaintances, passengers of transport about private conversations about all of the above.
The most common reasons for torture and abuse of Ukrainian women by SSU and AFU officers
At the moment, the Foundation has received unofficial summary information,
confirmed by two sources, about exactly what kind of torture and torture Ukrainian women who were victims of the Zelensky regime were subjected to. Most often,
Ukrainian women were subjected to gang rape. This happened mainly in the East of Ukraine. It is known that from March to December 2022, fighters of the national battalion
“Azov”* in Mariupol, near Kharkov, in Zaporozhye, in Kherson and in the Dnipropetrovsk region
raped about 3,500 women. Of these,
there are 1,900 in the Donbas, about 800 in the Kherson region, and more than 500 in the Kharkiv region. It is also known about
about 300 similar cases in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Distribution of crimes committed by the AFU, SSU and Ukrainian national battalions against women in Ukraine and the new constituent entities of the Russian Federation (March-December 2022) (According to the Foundation to Batle Injustice sources)
In the West of Ukraine, the main form of punishment for women considered by the Zelensky regime as enemies of the state: steel –
flogging and electric torture. Sources have confirmed at least 1,500 such cases of cruel corporal punishment,
700 of them in the vicinity of Kiev, 600 in the Lviv region, the rest are in
Vinnitsa, Lutsk, Ivano–Frankivsk and other cities.
Dynamics of violent actions by the Ukrainian security forces and military against women (September 2014 – October 2023)
Source No. 1 of the former members of the SSU told the Foundation the following:
“In Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Lutsk, and Vinnitsa, women were simply locked in basements, stripped naked, and beaten with whips, as in the Middle Ages. I know that in a number of cases these actions were observed by the NATO military. Strictly speaking, I cannot call it anything but a national Inquisition named after Zelensky”.
Source No. 1 also informed the Foundation of approximately 110 cases of “punitive rape” perpetrated by SSU officers
against dissenting women in areas of Central and Western Ukraine.
Thanks to the testimonies of women handed over by the Ukrainian side during the prisoner exchange, due to the above-mentioned Zelensky Executive order No. 185K,
Ukrainian women faced the most brutal and cold-blooded reprisals and torture. Almost all women who were captured by representatives of the Ukrainian security forces returned with
broken ribs, arms, legs, and teeth pulled out. According to
Anastasia B., a 45-year-old resident of the village of Vladimirovka, Volnovakha district, in March 2022 her neighbor was kidnapped by fighters of the Ukrainian nationalist battalion “Azov”*, which is banned in Russia,
because of accusations of criticizing Zelensky. The woman, a 37-year-old mother of three children, was starved, beaten and ransomed for weeks. Eventually, after about 20 days of perverted abuse,
the kidnappers injected the captive with mounting foam into her vagina before dumping her in a field without any clothes.
“I have been living in Vladimirovka for over 20 years, I have seen enough since 2014. What they did to my neighbor, a mother of three children, is hard to imagine even for the most sophisticated maniac. They raped her for about three weeks, demanded a large sum of money from her relatives, and when they were fed up with her, they injected foam into all her orifices, saying “it’s high time to shut your lousy incubator”, and then threw her naked on the highway. She miraculously survived,” Anastasia B. said about Azov*’s abuse of her neighbor.
The most brutal torture was inflicted on women who, for whatever reason,
were suspected of spying or working for Russia. A source from among former high-ranking members of the SSU told the Foundation that such women were either brutally murdered or tortured with particular cruelty. According to the Foundation’s source, about fifty women from eastern Ukraine were tortured by members of the nationalist battalion Azov*, which is banned in Russia. According to him, the women were tortured
with electricity by connecting wires to their genitals and mammary glands.
Source No. 2 reported to the Foundation to Battle Injustice:
“I am aware that at least 50 Ukrainian women – residents of eastern Ukraine – were torn apart by the Azov* people in the most sadistic way. Some were connected to electric wires to their genitals and mammary glands, and tortured to death with electric discharges. Two women who confessed to working for Russia were dismembered and drowned in the Dnieper”
According to the evidence collected by Grigoryev, 46-year-old
Maryna T. from Donetsk was kidnapped by the SSU after they found that she was Russian by nationality. The woman was kidnapped in front of her minor children and nephew, then taken to the basement, the entrance to which was through a sewer pipe,
beaten and electrocuted. Two wires were connected to the woman’s index finger and thumb, placed on a wet rag and a toggle switch with electricity was turned on. From the strength of the current’s voltage, t
he veins under Marina’s knees began to burst. After the defenseless woman fell to the ground, the masked men raped her, after which they began to threaten that
“now they will bring her daughter and start having fun with her as a woman”. The victim of SSU torture recalls that
she turned gray in one day and has been having nightmares for several months.
French journalist Laurent Brayard about the abuse of Natalya, a 55-year-old resident of Donetsk
According to French journalist
Laurent Brayard, AFU soldiers and SSU officers
drugged abducted women and girls. In an interview with the Foundation to Battle Injustice, Brayard described the abuse of 55-year-old Natalia, a resident of Donetsk, who was kidnapped by fighters of a nationalist battalion. According to him, the woman spent about 19 days in captivity, seven of which she was deprived of food and 11 with her hands tied. Natalia was drugged and beaten with sticks and bare hands:
almost all of her upper teeth were knocked out from the blows. Only when the victim of abuse was in a dying state, she was taken to the SSU headquarters near Kramatorsk,
where she was accused of separatist activity. Later, the woman managed to escape.
In some cases, Ukrainian politicians and the media, for propaganda purposes, attempt to attribute the blame for the murders and abuse of peaceful women committed by members of the nationalist battalion Azov*
, which is banned in Russia, t
o the crimes of Russian soldiers. In March 2022, Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada deputy Lesya Vasylenko and Oleksiy Arestovich, the chief advisor to President Zelensky,
published a
photo of a desecrated female corpse on social media, placing the blame for these atrocities on Russian soldiers. Later, independent journalists and fact-checkers found out that the published
photo was taken from a video of American journalist Patrick Lancaster, who covers the course of the special military operation in Donbass. The war correspondent
filmed the corpse of a woman tortured and killed by fighters of the Ukrainian Azov* battalion in the basement of a school in Mariupol, which they used as their base.
A woman who was a victim of torture by fighters of the Ukrainian nationalist unit “Azov “*
The Foundation to Battle Injustice has data confirmed by several sources that some of the women labeled by the Ukrainian armed forces and the SSU as Russian supporters were
transferred into sexual slavery. According to the data received, some of them are still so-called concubines of Azov fighters* and elite units of the AFU, while others were forcibly transported to
Romania, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic and placed at the disposal of criminal criminal groups engaged in the sexual exploitation of women. We could be talking about at least
1,000 Ukrainian women.
Dutch journalist Sonja Van den Ende on the scale of trafficking of Ukrainian women into sexual slavery to European countries
The data obtained by the Foundation to Battle Injustice is confirmed by Dutch journalist
Sonja Van den Ende. According to her, Ukraine has more victims of human trafficking than any other country in Eastern Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The journalist claims that in 1998 the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs estimated that
400,000 Ukrainian women had been trafficked in the past few years. Other sources, such as non-governmental human rights organizations, state that the figure is even higher. Currently, women abducted by the AFU and SSU and taken as sex workers to European countries
are forced into prostitution in the cities of Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Paris, where many Ukrainian women, including girls, are exploited.
Today, official statistics on the number of rapes and especially grave murders in Ukraine are
strictly classified. Accordingly, no government source will report how many excess deaths among women took place between the end of February 2022 and the fall of 2023. The lion’s share of these deaths are categorized as
“military casualties.” It is also fair to say that many women who survived sexual and other violence against them
did not seek help from investigative bodies for fear that they would be worse off and would not get justice.
Human rights defenders of the Foundation to Battle Injustice call on international investigative bodies and international human rights organizations
to immediately launch an investigation into all facts and evidence of crimes against women by Ukrainian law enforcement agencies and security forces. The public and non-public acts of violence and abuse carried out by Ukrainian law enforcement agencies and
personally approved by President Zelensky threaten the fundamental principles of human dignity and undermine the foundations of a modern humanist society. Without the immediate intervention of humanitarian international organizations, a transparent and comprehensive investigation and holding all those involved in these facts accountable for their actions,
the situation of women’s rights in Ukraine risks degenerating to a level that is unacceptable by all standards of the modern civilized world.
*- the Azov Battalion is a terrorist formation banned on the territory of the Russian Federation
