There is a phone call floating around the internet in which a Russian wife tells her soldier husband to rape Ukrainian women. Just use protection, she says.

Russian Wife Gives Okay to Rape

It sounds outrageous — could you imagine an American wife telling her husband to do the same? But Radio Free Europe did some digging, and yes, it’s true.

The Russian soldier is 27-year-old Roman Bykovsky, and his wife is Olga Bykovskaya. RFE was able to track their posts on the VKontakte social network.

https://twitter.com/kromark/status/1514964537690177541?s=20&t=2yL5ATrWOa2HnRxH2iDVNg

Both are from Oryol, Russia, which is about 220 miles southwest of Moscow. However, they moved to Crimea a few years after Russia seized the area from Ukraine. Roman Bykovsky is part of the 108th Air Assault Regiment, based in Novorossiysk, and participated in the invasion of the Kherson region.

So in a phone call with wife Olga, he received permission to rape Ukrainian women. Here’s part of the conversation that Ukrainian intelligence claimed they intercepted:

“Ukrainian women there. Rape them. Yeah. Don’t tell me anything, understand?” 

“So I should rape and not tell you anything.” 

“Yes, so that I wouldn’t know anything. Why do you ask?”

“Can I really?” 

“Yeah, I allow you. Just use protection.”

And, she’s giggling throughout the exchange, too.

Radio Free Europe Brought Receipts

Reporters from Radio Free Europe were able to obtain the phone numbers of both these individuals and then track their social media accounts. Mark Krutov of RFE called both of them, confirmed their names, and then was able to match the voices he heard with those on the taped call. Roman denied that the man on the call was him. However, Olga talked more, telling Krutov that her husband was in a Sevastopol hospital, recovering from wounds.

Ukrainian women have received a very small break, apparently.

Here’s a video providing information on the pair that Radio Free Europe obtained:

So were these two just joking? It’s hard to tell, and no one has accused Bykovsky of rape. Nor have any other charges been filed against this lovely couple. But growing numbers of rape reports are emerging from Ukrainian civilians against Russian soldiers.

And what about another intercepted call from a Russian soldier who bragged of torturing prisoners by chopping off fingers with shovels and stones. Is that a joke, too?

Russian Soldiers and Their Legacy of Rape

Of course rape has been a part of warfare since, well, forever. As Mia Bloom of Georgia State University wrote regarding the rapes in Ukraine:

“Rape as a strategy of war has the effect of undermining the cohesiveness of a community by attacking its very foundation – the women.”

But at the end of World War II — indeed, even after the war ended — Russian troops used rape of German women as a form of payback as well as humiliation. One historian referred to it as “the largest coordinated assault on women in recorded history.” And Russians didn’t just stop at rape, either — they also murdered their victims, including children. Every time they entered a German city, the soldiers were allowed three days to do what they will.

Two German women and three children killed by Soviets, Metgethen, Germany. Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

Russian dissident and author Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who was an artillery captain in the Soviet Army during World War II, witnessed such atrocities as they marched across East Prussia. What he saw haunted him, and he later expressed his anguish in a long poem called “Prussian Nights.” An excerpt reads:

“The little daughter’s on the mattress,
Dead. How many have been on it
A platoon, a company perhaps?
A girl’s been turned into a woman,
A woman turned into a corpse.
It’s all come down to simple phrases:
Do not forget! Do not forgive!
Blood for blood! A tooth for a tooth!”

Soviet authorities arrested Alexandr Solzhenitsyn three weeks after the offensive began when he criticized the barbaric treatment of the Germans.

Continuing an Evil Legacy

So it seems as if Roman Bykovsky, with permission from his wife, is just continuing a brutal legacy.

Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, wrote about rapes in Ukraine in American Spectator:

“And I can assure you that in the modern history of Russian soldiering, these allegations of wartime rapes are absolutely nothing new. Tragically, they’re par for the course for the Russian Army.”

It’s part of a strategy for Russian soldiers — in the same manner as their grandfathers and great-grandfathers — to see Ukrainian woman as less than human. One Russian state TV pundit, in fact, said that Putin’s goal should be to erase the very notion of being “Ukrainian.” Moreover, he added the very name “Ukrainians” is insulting, and there should be no such nation or nationality to exist outside of Russia.

Shades of genocide and — dare I say it? — the Third Reich, no?

So is it any wonder that a young Russian wife would be so motivated by revulsion toward Ukrainians that she would actually encourage her husband to rape their women? Even if it was “just a joke.”

Featured image: German woman in Czechoslovakia, 1945. YouTube screenshot via Medium.