“I laid outside for a month,” the Russian military medic told about the punishment she received after refusing sexual relations with a Russian army colonel, writes the portal “The New York Post”.
The woman, who calls herself Margarita, says that she has been in rehabilitation for two months after being at the front and is taking anti-depressants because of the trauma she experienced in Ukraine. Since then, she has had constant nightmares and panic attacks.
According to Margarita, Russian women often become sex slaves for Russian soldiers in the war in Ukraine.
Media Radio Free Europe/Radio Freedom has published an interview with a service employee who said that male officers force women to have sex, and those who refuse face terrible treatment.
Margarita, a single mother living in the city of Belgorod with her adult children with special needs, retired from the army in 2017 after 11 years of service. But last summer she decided to volunteer as a medic in Ukraine to provide for her family.
According to the woman, as soon as she arrived in Nizhny Novgorod for training, the colonel commanding the tank platoon decided to make her his “field wife”. Margarita said she rejected the colonel’s sexual advances.
Determined to tire her, the colonel, according to Margarita, ordered his subordinates to create impossible living and working conditions for her. “I just slept outside for a month. While others spent the nights in tents and houses, I slept on the ground, next to the road, in a small forest,” Margarita recalled.
According to Margarita, the medical group she was in consisted of seven women between the ages of 23 and 38, many of them married, and each of them was forced to serve one or more officers.
“When we went there, of course, nobody knew what was going on. And once we realized, there was no turning back,” she said.
“Mostly the girls have come to terms with it. They decided that in this war it is better to live in paradise – well-fed and with cigarettes,” Margarita believes.
But women were not the only victims of violence. According to Margarita, conscripted men who refused to fight on the front lines were regularly imprisoned naked in dank cellars with rats. If it didn’t help, I had to sleep in self-dug graves.
Despite the harrowing experience, Margarita said she would be willing to re-enlist to serve in the Russian army, as she said she could not make a living as a civilian.
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