Ukrainian woman allegedly held as sex slave by Russian soldier for over a year before miraculous escape: report
A Ukrainian woman was allegedly kept as a sex slave by a Russian soldier who raped her for more than a year — before she finally managed to escape and identify her alleged captor, according to reports.The nightmare began for the woman — identified by the Times of London only as Sofia — when she was snatched from her home in a Village near Kharkiv shortly after Russian invaded the country in February 2022.Sofia, just 21 at the time, claimed she rejected repeated advances from Russian soldier Vyacheslav Dubenko while he and his comrades occupied the village.But the situation spiraled out of control when he showed up at her house armed and flanked by two soldiers and said, “Do you want your family to be dead?”Dubenko, now 32, then allegedly took Sofia to a nearby building and raped her.She was allegedly assaulted several more times, and when her family reported it to the occupiers’ commanding officer he reportedly dismissed it, saying “The young will be young,” and did nothing to stop it.Things escalated again in June when Dubenko allegedly convinced a pair of fellow soldiers to kidnap Sofia, taking her across the border in to the Russian city of Belogrod and locking her in a “boarded up” apartment, the Times of London reported.“The balcony had metal bars,” said Anna Ponomarenko, a top war crime investigator for Kharkiv police.“Everything was boarded up.
The doors were locked with both keys and padlocks,” she told the Times.“He took away her phone.
He left her food, that’s it.It was sex slavery.”For over a year Sofia was held captive in the apartment and repeatedly raped by Dubenko — who only allowed her outside by night to sit with him on a nearby bench, Ponomarenko alleged.During such times he would threaten to go back in Kharkiv and murder Sofia’s family if she refused to have sex with him or ever tried to escape.Sofia — cut off from the outside world and having no idea that her village had been liberated — complied and s...