Women who have been raped by Russian soldiers yearn for justice.

kyiv, Ukraine — Every day Viktoriya has to walk past the house where she was raped by a Russian soldier the same age as her teenage son.

Russian troops arrived in his two-street village near the Kyiv suburb of Borodianka in early March. Shortly after, she says, two of them raped her and a neighbor, killed two men, including her neighbor's husband, and destroyed several houses.

"If you don't think about all this, you can live," Viktoriya said during an interview in the village on a recent rainy day. not forgotten."

She is cooperating with prosecutors because she said she wants the perpetrators to feel the "lifelong pain" they left her "I want them to be punished", she said.

It is not certain that they will ever be punished and it may take years to be determined. The rapes were among many atrocities Russian troops inflicted on Ukrainian civilians during weeks of occupation in suburban Kyiv and elsewhere. But the challenges of continuing the assaults are daunting : the evidence is limited and the victims are traumatized and sometimes reluctant to testify to their attack, or even to report it. The accused soldiers have mostly disappeared.

Ukrainian prosecutors say they are investigating thousands of war crimes, including execution-style killings and indiscriminate bombings of civilians. Among them, "dozens" involve rape, said Kateryna Duchenko, who oversees rape cases at Ukraine's prosecutor general's office - a small percentage that only accounts for a fraction of the suffering.