On Thursday, February 24th, 2022, Russia expanded its invasion of Ukraine to the whole of the country. As reports of the Russian atrocities make their way to the media, it has become clear that the Russian army is using rape as a weapon in Ukraine.[1]
Maria Mezentseva, a Ukrainian member of parliament, described a man who was shot and killed at his home in Brovary, an eastern suburb of Kyiv. After Russian soldiers killed him, they repeatedly raped his wife in front of their child. The soldiers threatened the child before leaving. Ukrainian authorities are investigating and pressing charges against the servicemen who did this, with charges of rape, sexual assault, and war crimes.
This was not the only report. While authorities say that rape and sexual assault are being underreported, they state that a number of reports have come in of women, usually senior citizens, are being gang-raped. These atrocious crimes are just the next step in a long list of horrors committed by armies all across the globe since the beginning of warfare.[2] And though this kind of violence is not unique to the Russian military, it is very much rooted in a longer history of Russian sexual violence as a tool of war.
Rape and sexual violence are regular tools used by armies to control their enemies and dehumanize the people they’re massacring. According to anthropologist Roland Littlewood, “the primary impulse may be transformed into violence, whereby the fetishized weapon rather than the male genital organ becomes the physical power of penetration.”[3] Therefore, rape is used as a tool of power over the enemy, rather than a sword or gun.
This same idea can be applied to rape as retribution. Ruth Seifert wrote that rape is the “most severe attack imaginable upon the intimate self and the dignity of a human being: by any measure it is a mark of severe torture.”[4] It is the power that rape grants to one army over another that makes it such a powerful tool of retribution. Torture is used to make a group’s enemies hurt, and rape is no different. It is a tool to dehumanize and put down entire populations during a conflict. After feeling helpless for so long, the immediate response is to seek a return to the status quo, no matter how atrocious.
After the Nazis turned on the Soviets and invaded the USSR, Stalin and the other Soviets joined forces with the Allies – Britain, the United States, and their allies – to repel the German attack and defeat the Nazi regime. When they turned the tide against the German army and pushed into Germany the Soviet soldiers raped thousands of German women. This was rape as retribution and as a marker of power. The Soviets raped German women to allegedly avenge the women that were assaulted by Germans soldiers. The goal was to make the Nazis feel the same horror and helplessness that they felt. Raping German women was also an exertion of power, as the Red Army showed the Nazis that they couldn’t protect their loved ones.
When the Soviet troops made it to Berlin, they raped German women en masse. In an anonymous memoir, one woman recounted her experience of Soviet occupation. It was her understanding that the Soviets looked at the women of Berlin and said, “What did the Germans do to our women?” They then proceeded to rape the author and a number of other women, passing them between soldiers.[5] This German woman’s perception of why she and others were being raped is that it was retribution. Though the Soviet government and army actually ordered their soldiers not to rape, they also named the Germans as deserving of retribution.[6] This undoubtedly emboldened Soviet soldiers to exercise their power over German women, men, and children.
This rhetoric has been deployed in the current invasion of Ukraine. Russian soldiers have been exposed to years of propaganda intended to portray Ukrainians as Nazis and enemies of Russia. The Russian media portrays Ukrainians as aggressors, attacking Russians in Ukraine’s eastern regions. These kinds of representations, pushed out to all Russians, could certainly fuel a similar need to avenge those allegedly hurt by Ukrainians. Specifically, these would fuel the military apparatus of the Russian Federation to dehumanize the Ukrainians whom they were told were destroying Russian culture and the Russian language in the east.
When Putin invaded Crimea in 2014, the Russians took many Crimean Tatars, a Turkish-speaking ethnic group from the region, prisoner. Russian soldiers tortured the Tatars, some with physical assault and electrocution, and others psychologically, threatening the Tatars with rape and sexual assault.[7] There is nothing in place to stop the Russian military from doing the same thing to the Ukrainians. Russian state television has been pumping anti-Ukrainian propaganda, which alienates and dehumanizes, to their citizens for years, throwing fuel onto the fire that is now sweeping into a sovereign nation.
Currently, Russia is using similar tactics on its own citizens in retribution for their moves against the power of Putin’s regime. Many of those who are protesting the war from inside of Russia are being arrested and forced to sign court orders. Just like with the Crimean Tatars in 2014, they are brutally beating these protestors to coerce some form of confession. In many cases, the captives are threatened with physical beatings and torture, as well as being told that the police would “throw us to the homeless, rape us.”[8] The Russian authorities are using the threat of sexual violence as a tool against their own people.
Both cases show the distance the Russian government and authorities are willing to go to produce the image they want: that of a regime which does not tolerate challenges to its power. In both 2014 and 2022, the Russians tortured people for disagreeing with them. They beat, electrocuted, and threatened to rape them for opposing their unlawful and immoral acts. The prisoners in 2022 are Russian citizens who oppose an unjustified war, but are being treated like enemies of the state, facing dehumanizing treatment to produce lies for the Russian regime. The government uses its power in such a way that individual Russian citizens begin to get a sense of power for themselves, feeding the fire of this and continuing the trend of state superiority and dissenters as traitors.
All of this together paints a picture of power, retribution, and atrocious crimes. More importantly, it is clear that the tactics Putin’s army is employing in Ukraine today share a larger history with Soviet tools of war and propaganda influence. In both cases, as is often the case in militaristic rape, soldiers exercised power over the conquered through sexual violence. But in both cases we see the effects of propaganda realized: the Russian and Soviet states justified their war and sexual violence against Germany as retribution for perceived crimes against their own citizens. They are showing the world how far they will go to create a place for themselves in this world, at the expense of human dignity and human lives.
Ethan Lantz is a History major and International Relations minor at Mercyhurst University in Erie, PA. Ethan’s primary studies are colonialism, decolonization, and European politics.
Notes
[1] Laurel Wamsley, “Rape has reportedly become a weapon in Ukraine. Finding justice may be difficult,” NPR, April 30, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/04/30/1093339262/ukraine-russia-rape-war-crimes.
[2] Harry Taylor, “Russian soldiers raping and sexually assauling women, says Ukraine MP,” The Guardian, March 27, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/27/russian-soldiers-raping-and-sexually-assaulting-womensays-ukraine-mp.
[3] Roland Littlewood, “Military Rape,” Anthropology Today 13, no. 2 (April 1997): 14, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2783037.
[4] Ruth Seifert, “War and Rape: A Preliminary Analysis,” Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ed. Alexandra Stiglmayer (University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 55.
[5] Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered the City, trans. Philip Boehm (Picador, 2006), 52-54.
[6] Miriam Gebhardt, Crimes Unspoken: The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War, trans. Nick Somers (Polity, 2017).
[7] Katerina Dee, “Repeating History: Russia Inflicting Crimes against Humanity upon the Crimean Tatars,” American University International Law Review 36, no. 2 (January 2021): 318.
[8] Andrew Roth, “‘It’s an attack on everyone’: Russian activists under increasing pressure for opposing war on Ukraine,” The Guardian, March 18. 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/18/its-an-attack-on-everyone-russian-activists-under-increasing-pressure-for-opposing-war-on-ukraine.