As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday detailed Russian war crimes against civilians before the UN Security Council, the country’s human rights ombudsman shared details of Russian troops forcing hostages to dig graves and raping young women. “In the village of Viktorivka in the Chernihiv region, which was under occupation for 25 days, the Russians held people hostage in the basement, from the elderly to newborns,” Lyudmila Denisova wrote in a statement shared on Telegram. She said the hostages were denied medical treatment, causing one man with asthma to die. “Russian militants ordered the hostages to bury the body next to them in the woods,” she wrote. In Kozhun, in the Kyiv region, the bodies of five men with their hands bound behind their backs were found on the territory of a children’s camp after “they were tortured and then killed in cold blood,” Denysova wrote. Three “tortured peaceful Ukrainians” were also found in the Sumy region, she said. Those who survived the Russian occupation also reported sexual violence, with a 29-year-old woman in the Kharkiv region repeatedly raped by a Russian soldier. According to Denisova, the woman, who was not named, refused to leave her incapacitated mother’s side, so the soldier “simply shot the old woman in front of her daughter.” A similarly disturbing scene is said to have played out in Mala Rohan, where a 31-year-old woman sheltering with her 5-year-old daughter reporting “repeatedly” being sexually assaulted by a Russian soldier who “held a weapon to her head.”
