- Ukrainian security services intercepted a phone call between a Russian soldier and his wife.
- The woman can be heard in the call granting permission to her husband to rape Ukrainian women, RFE/RL reported.
- There are a growing number of allegations from Ukrainian women of rape by Russian soldiers.
Ukrainian security services intercepted a phone call between a Russian soldier and his wife in which she can be heard granting him permission to rape Ukrainian women, according to an investigation by RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty (RFE/RL).
The Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) said they intercepted the call between the couple in their twenties earlier this month in the Kherson region of Ukraine, RFE/RL reported.
In an excerpt of the call, released by the SSU and analyzed by RFE/RL, a woman can be heard giving her husband the go-ahead to commit a war crime.
She can be heard saying: "You go there, rape Ukrainian women, and don't tell me anything. Understood?"
Later on in the conversation, she can then be heard laughing before the man — a Russian soldier — asks her for her explicit permission to rape women.
"Yes, I allow it," the woman replies, per the audio excerpt. "Just use contraception!" says the mother of one.
RFE/RL identified the participants in the call by linking social media accounts to telephone numbers provided by the SSU. The soldier denied he was the person on the call but according to RFE/RL, both his and his wife's voices matched those heard in the audio recordings, said RFE/RL.
The soldier has not been accused of rape, and no charges have been filed against the couple, RFE/RL said.
When the wife was contacted by an RFE/RL reporter, she said her husband had been wounded and was in a hospital in the Sevastopol, Crimea, the port home to Russia's Black Sea Fleet. She would not answer any other questions, RFE/RL said.
The media outlet noted that the couple, who moved to annexed Crimea in 2018, may have been joking during the call, but it comes amid a flurry of allegations by Ukrainian women that they have been raped.
About 25 girls and women aged 14 to 24 were systematically raped during the occupation in the basement of one house in Bucha, according to the Ukrainian ombudswoman for human rights, per BBC News.
A 31-year-old woman in Malaya Rohan, a village in the Kharkiv region, said she was raped at gunpoint multiple times by a soldier who entered the school where her family was sheltering, according to the international NGO Human Rights Watch.
Another woman, aged 33, told The Times that she was raped after Russian soldiers killed her husband.
Kira Rudyk, a Ukrainian MP, told CBS News that rape is "happening systematically" in areas being occupied by the Russian.