She thought she was unshockable, then two castrated Ukrainian soldiers arrived

For a month the two men could not tell their psychologist what had happened to them, only that it was horrible beyond words. “If there’s hell somewhere, it’s worse than that,” said one.

The Ukrainian soldiers, aged 25 and 28, had been in Russian captivity — one for one month, the other for three.

After their return in a prisoner swap they had been referred to Anzhelika Yatsenko, 41, a psychologist in Poltava who deals with troubled young men. They were suicidal. The younger one had tried to kill himself. “I knew from previous cases they had probably been tortured,” she said. “As someone who gets referred the hardest cases, mostly men under 35, it’s very hard to surprise me.”

When they finally told her, it was, she said, “the first time I behaved not like a professional psychologist”.

“I’d never heard anything so horrible. I told them I needed the bathroom and went and cried and cried. I didn’t want them to see as they might think there’s no hope.”

The two men had been savagely beaten. Then the drunken Russians castrated them with a knife.

“One of them told me, ‘I don’t know how I am still alive, there was so much blood, I thought I’d die of blood poisoning’,” she said.

“And of course it’s not just the physical damage. Imagine, they are young men just starting their sexual life and then in one second it’s all over. They still feel something, all these hormones, but they can’t do anything. They can never be sexually active. For a young man it’s the worst thing to happen.

“Their dignity has been damaged so badly and it’s impossible to forget. The Russians told them, ‘We are doing this so you can’t have kids.’ To me this is genocide.”

As we saw in Bucha, Mariupol and elsewhere, FSB units (the new acronym used for the KGB), made widespread and systematic use of maiming torture and extrajudicial executions. International war crimes investigators have more than 80,000 cases open on Russian forces - including many for castration.

Beyond the huge planned program to purge political opposition by the Russian Intelligence Services, Russia unleashed tens of thousands of poorly trained and undisciplined soldiers, who had been recruited from their prisons - with Prigozhin expressing a preference for convicted murderers, and explicitly allowing convicted sex offenders to join as well. Looting, rape and brutality has been widespread.

--- "...even if one case is wrong, they tend to be true in aggregate."

I am fond of the seemingly banal phrase, "anecdote is the singular of data." And the inverse is true. Generally I think we better deal with the anecdotal than the general, such that focus be on something we can more easily comprehend.

As an example, most Americans cannot actually calculate with a number as large as our current and rising national debt. Similarly, most of us cannot fathom the immensity of a Holomodor or Holocaust or Great Leap Forward.

In this particular situation and with so many "alleged," I will await a clearer proof of the current anecdotes and the data aggregated. As always, time will tell.

First, let’s look at the awkward wording: “One of them told me, ‘I don’t know how I am still alive, there was so much blood, I thought I’d die of blood poisoning’,” she said,

This was not only awkward wording, but also bad punctuation. It should have been punctuated: “One of them told me, ‘I don’t know..............blood poisoning’, she said.” That correct punctuation makes it clear which is the soldiers quote ‘ ‘, and which is her quote “ “.

As to her statement she had “never heard anything so horrible” at age 41, that does not surprise me. At age 39 I had not heard anything so horrible until I entered group therapy first as a customer, then as a trainee, finally with ten years of seeing individuals with serious emotional problems who had not been helped by conventional therapy. The methodology I studied and used involved open ended sessions, not the usual 50 minute hour routinely used by mental health practitioners. The training sessions involved 3 hours of clients paired to work together in a large group setting under supervision of a trained therapist. This allowed each person 1 1/2 hours for their own issues. After we finished the 3 hours we would meet as a group to share what we had learned if we wished to. Often this sharing would stir up new intense feelings and the therapist would encourage that person to pick a partner and go back to the other room to work out the issues some more.

When I saw individuals, the sessions often lasted 1 1/2 hours, and sometimes longer. I never ended a session until we both felt the issue at hand was finished for that day. [I hope what I write next does not offend.]
People I knew or worked with had experienced such trauma as erotic abuse from age 2 into teen years by multiple family members; similar abuse by a brother using the family dog for the act; and imprisonment experiencing such acts for 8 hours, after which the child (age 7 or 8) was released, went home, was ignored, fell asleep for 24 hours, and never remembered it until the day I helped him recover the memory (now as an alcoholic in his 30s).

Regarding the woman who was pleased at the medical care she had received, we don’t know if she was one of the many women who Russian soldiers have raped in Ukraine. Had I gotten pregnant after being raped, I would be very pleased if I received good medical care including a desired abortion. I would still be furious with the rapist and wish he was dead for forcing me to have to make such a painful choice.

I have only known one intersex person (someone born with both male and female body parts). They presented as male, but I don’t know if their female parts had been removed. I do know there have been some tragic outcomes when doctors have encouraged parents to choose one sex long before the baby becomes a child or teen with obvious interests and hormonal inclinations.

would I thought inclusion of “we would be doing well if” pretty much indicated I felt were were falling short of meeting our ideals. “But they don’t” would simply be a repetition. Since you seem to favor repetition, let me add that I would have said some of the things said subsequently by BeauBo, but I felt no need to repeat my original negative appraisal. Putin’s charges for War Crimes by the ICC says it all.

One of the negative things operating against our general US ethical values is censorship. I was censored at least six times at AOL articles for trying to post a comment on the subject of Covid-19 during 2020 and 2021. I was accused of “violating” community standards by trying to say such scientific facts as “if zinc can enter infected cells it can stop Covid virus reproduction” or “HCQ is an ionophore for zinc, which helps zinc get into infected cells more easily.” Then I discovered there was a community of Covid concerned FReepers and shifted my comments here.

“One of them told me, ‘I don’t know how I am still alive, there was so much blood, I thought I’d die of blood poisoning’,’” she said.

The placement of the single quotes, double quotes, and commas in the original article is nearly correct - for a U.S.-American text.

Specifically, in the above passage, I've colored the incorrectly place single quote in bold RED, and shifted it to its proper place (in bold BLUE).

British conventions differ, as do, e.g., German punctuation rules (I handled all kinds of such texts for 30 years as a professional copy-editor).

Regards,

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