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.
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 remembered the wide range of painful methods used on her, such as grinding down her teeth and shocking her “until she screamed loudly enough” to please her tormentors.
She identified Vasyl Yevdokimov, also known as “Lenin”, as one of the ringleaders – a key figure in Russia’s Izolyatsia secret torture prison.
She recounted how Yevdokimov himself “filed down [her] teeth with a nail file,” inserted an object into her body, and subjected her to other unimaginable sexual abuse.
The scarred mother said her attackers were pure maniacs, and that most people would not derive pleasure from maiming a naked, bound woman.
After subjecting her to various forms of torture, Natalia’s captors tied her hands above her head in a cramped space and made her stand like that throughout the freezing night.
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.
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.
