HUman Rights

The victims of Russian military aggressions since the spring of 2014 have been millions of Ukrainian women, and the Russian Federation is fully responsible for violating human rights, both in occupied Crimea and Donbas. This was recognized by two recent resolutions of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

Women and children are the most vulnerable during these conflicts. Allow me to provide a few harrowing figures. According to recent data, in Ukraine today there are 1.7 million internally displaced persons. Of those, about 900,000 are women and more than 236,000 are children. Over the past two years in Donbas, 495 women have died in the civilian population.

In this particularly difficult situation regarding violations of the rights of women and children in the occupied territories, the Russian occupying army has taken Ukrainian women as hostages. According to the Security Service of Ukraine, there are 238 Ukrainian women in prison at the moment. At the moment, 233 women have been found they either have been released, or their bodies have been identified, although five were left in prison. The most well-known Kremlin prisoner, Nadiya Savchenko, spent almost 2 years in a Russian prison. Another Ukrainian woman — a journalist, Maria Varfolomeyeva — was imprisoned for more than a year in Luhansk. She was freed in March of this year.