Thank you.
It's actually one of the most difficult topics I have to comment on when speaking about what is going on on the ground in Ukraine.
Just to give you an understanding of the victims, they are aged anywhere from four years old to 80 years old. There is no discrimination between young or old or social status. Basically, the idea of rape, in the case of the Russian army against the Ukrainian people, is not to gain sexual pleasure but to intimidate the population, to inflict fear on the population and to demoralize the civilian population in their resilience and in their resistance.
I think the main thing the Russian army saw when they came to Ukraine was that Kyiv would not fall within three hours or three days and that actually the population was standing strong behind the army, behind the Ukrainian military. This is where the idea comes from that there needs to be a demoralizing factor towards the people.
The numbers that you also have to look at are those of the prisoners of war. The prisoners of war are not just the military; they are also the civilians. Among these civilians, the majority of them are actually women, because it's the women who are continuing to serve their communities as social workers, as doctors, as street cleaners. It's these women who fall prey to the Russian soldiers because, again, the Russians need to take them out of the equation so that society falls and does not function properly. This is the general idea.
I have just a final point, if I may, on the orders, as you have asked.
What we know from hearsay from the local people in the Kyiv region is that when the first elite units were coming down on the 24th of February in Gostomel, Bucha and Irpin and it was realized that they would not be able to take Kyiv, they were pulled out from the area, but they told the civilian population, “If you have the chance, leave now, because the next units who are going to be coming in are not elite units, and they have clear orders to do whatever they want with the looting, with the torture, with the killing, with the rape.”
This was a warning given by some of the elite units of Russia to the people of Ukraine to leave their homes, because the next ones would be coming in just to destroy and to exterminate everything living in these areas.