[imagesource:zumapress.com]

Fighting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine sounds like a nightmare within a nightmare.

The Russian male soldiers have it bad but the female Russian combat medics serving in Ukraine are subject to a whole lot worse.

A report has emerged with these women claiming that they are forced into becoming so-called “field wives” or sex slaves for their male officers.

The independent news outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty published an interview Tuesday with a service member, called Margarita, who said that women who refused to provide sex for the Russian commanders would face horrible mistreatment.

Margarita said that the horrendous conditions left her suffering from constant nightmares and panic attacks, forcing her to spend the past two months in rehabilitation, taking antidepressants for the severe trauma she endured in Ukraine, noted The New York Post.

Margarita, a single mom living in the city of Belgorod with her grown special-needs children, retired from the Army in 2017 after 11 years of service. But last summer she decided to volunteer as a medic in Ukraine to provide for her family.

“Even when I’m not alone and I’m doing something, I still see before my eyes all that horror,” Margarita said, referring to the brutality and abuse allegedly committed by Vladimir Putin’s officers against their own subordinates.

She recalls how as soon as she arrived in Nizhniy Novgorod for training, a colonel commanding a tank platoon singled her out to make her his “field wife”, a role that includes cooking, cleaning and pleasuring the male officers.

Margarita said she tried for a long time to rebuff the colonel’s sexual advances, but he wore her down with torturous tactics and so she eventually complied:

Determined to wear her down, the colonel, according to Margarita, ordered his subordinates to create impossible living and working conditions for her.

“For a month I simply slept outside,” Margarita recalled. “While others spent nights in tents and houses, I slept on the ground, next to a road, in a small forest.”

When her spirit refused to “break” from these measures, the commander sent her to the frontline where things became much harder:

According to Margarita, the medical platoon she was in included seven women between the ages of 23 and 38, many of them married, each of whom was pressured to service one or more officers.

“When we went there, no one, of course, knew what was going on. And when we understood, there was no turning back,” she said

She recalls how a medic named Svetlana was shot by an officer in a drunken or jealous rage, leaving her permanently disabled. Incidents like these are often blamed on Ukraine to cover the Russian soldiers’ asses, too.

Another colleague of hers, Alina, was “given” to an officer in September, and then “passed around” among different officers only to never return to her platoon:

“The girl went along with it,” she said. “And mostly the girls have made peace with it. They decided that it’s better to live in paradise in this war — fed and with cigarettes.”

Fleeing is impossible because they’d run the risk of being shot by their troops while trying to cross the border, and so they do what they must, to survive.

The male Russian soldiers are also in for a traumatic time, with stories of some starving and desperate to escape waterlogged trenches where they would stay for weeks on end, shooting their own legs so that they can get medical attention and escape the gruelling deluge.

According to Margarita, male conscripts who refused to fight on the front lines were also routinely locked in damp basements, naked, crawling with rats:

If that method failed, she said commanders also had a more “original” way to get their subordinates to comply with orders.

“They would force [conscripts] to dig their own graves. They would dig a hole and then be forced to lie in it,” Margarita recounted. “And other guys, at gunpoint, would sprinkle dirt all over them. Even their heads would not be sticking out. Then the platoon leader or company commander would walk off and shoot at those holes one by one.”

Being buried alive made these men “fools” because they no longer cared about anything, which was the state that they would be sent into battle with.

As I said, in war, nightmares are contained within yet more nightmares.

[source:nypost]