Ukraine prosecutor-general says Russian soldiers raped a woman after breaking into her home and killing her husband

• Ukraine’s prosecutor-general said on Tuesday that a Russian soldier raped a Ukrainian civilian.
• The soldier broke into a civilian home, shot its owner, and raped his wife, Iryna Venediktova said.
• Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of using rape as an instrument of war. 

Ukraine’s prosecutor-general accused Russian soldiers of killing a civilian and raping his wife after breaking into their home near Kyiv. 

Iryna Venediktova said in a Facebook post on Tuesday that the attack took place in Brovary, an eastern suburb of the capital. There, a Russian soldier “broke into a private house and shot the owner,” she wrote, describing the victim as a civilian. 

Venediktova said the soldier was drunken, and that he and another Russian soldier then issued threats of violence and then raped the man’s wife several times. Their young child was nearby, she said. 

Insider was unable to verify the claims. Venediktova did not give names of anybody involved or cite evidence.

It is unclear when the alleged attack took place. Russian ground forces tried to take over Brovary in an assault starting March 11, as The New York Times reported.

Footage released by the Ukraine Defense Intelligence Agency on March 11 showed Ukrainian missiles causing chaos amongst a column of advancing Russian tanks at Skybyn, a village nearby. 

Ukrainian officials have previously accused Russian forces of raping Ukrainians as part of the invasion.

On March 4, addressing a London-based think tank, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said “we have numerous cases of, unfortunately, when Russian soldiers rape women in Ukrainian cities,” Reuters reported.

Reuters said it was unable to verify that claim.

The incident described by Venediktova on Tuesday is the first to be subject to an official investigation. This came after the woman, who survived, registered a complaint, according to Ukrainian MP Inna Sovsun. A request for the soldier’s detention had been filed in court, Venediktova said.

Kyiv prosecutors received the information as part of intelligence on Russian movements in occupied areas, Venediktova said.

Another MP, Lesia Vasylenko, accused Russia of using rape as an instrument of war. She drew a comparison to the mass rapes that followed the Soviet Red Army’s 1945 victories in Germany, where historians say two million German women were raped.