A UKRAINIAN mother has recounted her harrowing gang rape by 15 Russian militants who also threatened her 5-year-old daughter’s life.
Natalia Vlasova, born 1981, was tortured and sexually abused by a group of Russians who kidnapped her in the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2018.
Natalia Vlasova, centre, claims she has been tortured and raped by Russian militants since being arrested in 2018[/caption]
A cell inside Izolyatsia prison, where prisoners have claimed they were tortured and electrocuted by Russian captors[/caption]
She told her harrowing story to a Russian court at a trial in which she was sentenced to 18 years in prison on “absurd” terrorism charges.
Natalia’s testimony is the latest in a long string of accusations against Russian troops of using sexual violence as a weapon of war.
She recalled the sick range of torture methods inflicted upon her, including filing down her teeth and electrocuting her “until she screamed loud enough” to satisfy her assailants.
She identified Vasyl Yevdokimov, also known as “Lenin”, as one of the ringleaders – a key figure in Russia’s Izolyatsia secret torture prison.
She said that Yevdokimov himself “filed down [her] teeth with a nail file,” inserted a “bottle” into her body and subjected her to other unfathomable sexual violence.
The scarred mother said her attackers were pure maniacs, and that most people would not derive pleasure from maiming a naked, bound woman.
After torturing her in all manner of ways, Natalia’s captors bound her hands with her hands raised in a tiny space and forced her to stand like that all night in the biting cold.
She spoke of being systematically gang raped by fifteen men at one time.
The beasts also claimed they knew where her five-year-old daughter, Yulia, went to nursery – and jeered that they would send a booby-trapped toy to murder her.
Russian forces have long been accused of using rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war to intimidate and oppress their selected enemy.
Accusations of mass rape have surfaced from Putin’s current invasion of Ukraine since Febrauary 2022.
Natalia told her harrowing story in court, but the testimony was “totally ignored” by the Russian judge, Oleg Aleksandrovich Cherepov, known for his willingness to hand down the sentences desired by the Russian state.
Natalia has just been sentenced to 18 years in a Russian prison after being found guilty of terrorism charges and plotting to kill Yevdokimov, her chief torturer.
The only evidence that supported the accusations against Natalia was a video confession extracted whilst she was being tortured, and which she later retracted.
The trial has been described as a “legal absurdity” by Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.
Natalia was put on trial in Russia in June 2023 alongside two other Ukrainians, Serhiy Hruzynov and Victor Shydlovsky, charged with being part of a terrorism organization.
It is unclear what terrorism organization the three were accused of being involved in.
The three were sentenced December 24, 2024, when Hruzynov received 20 years and Shydlovsky received 22 years imprisonment.
The Sun team gained exclusive access to a Russian torture chamber in the city of Kupiansk, Ukraine, in 2022[/caption]
Previous tales of the Izolyatsia prison in Donetsk corroborates Natalia’s story.
In 2021, Ukrainian Ruslan Zakharov, 31, claimed he was taken to the basement of the facility after being accused of spying against Russia in 2019.
At the time he told the Telegraph: “[The electrocution] shakes you all up so hard; half of your body goes numb.
“You think they’re going to kill you: you feel helpless. You think you’re alone and no one will come to your rescue.”
Izolyatsia – meaning “isolation” in Russian – was a factory before it was transformed into an alleged torture chamber in 2014.
Survivors of the prison have claimed inmates were left on hanging racks, waterboarded and forced to fight each other.
The men and women held at the prison have sued Russia and Ukraine at the European Court of Human Rights.
Ruslan said the captors would smack him with a live wire as they “beat the truth out of him”.
He added that he was duct-taped and electrocuted on a desk and was forced to stand in his cell with his face against the wall and arms stretched over his head.
Ruslan and his mum had to pay more than £10,000 before he was released at the end of October 2019.
Bunks in the torture chamber in Kupiansk[/caption]