Today

Margarita

is in rehabilitation.

She visits a psychologist, takes strong antidepressants, trying to forget what happened to her recently.

"Palkan has his eye on you"

Margarita was offered to conclude a contract in the summer of 2022, when she came to the military office for a certificate for the bank that she is a military pensioner.

In 2017, after 11 years of service in the army, she retired and moved to Belgorod, but could not find a normal job for 5 years.

She decided to volunteer for the so-called "special operation".

"My children are sick, even though they are already adults.

They are on me, and I am alone in them.

Plus loans.

In general, I agreed, - says Margarita.

- They didn't hire me as a signalman by profession, they hired me as an orderly in a hospital ward.

I had to learn all this quickly, because there was no time to think."

But Margarita did not find herself in the medical company right away.

According to her, the colonel, who liked her, ordered her to the headquarters.

"When I first arrived in Nizhny Novgorod, in Navasmalino, this colonel immediately noticed me at the construction site.

He commands the 10th tank regiment.

He said: "Margo, come to me."

He asked why I wasn't dressed, I didn't have a uniform then.

I said that our trade service is not working very well and that it is not suitable for me.

He ordered me to get dressed and said that I was going to the headquarters to work tomorrow.

I didn't understand at first, it was as if I had arrived at the maternity hospital, and I needed to study medicine.

And when I went to the headquarters for work and began to communicate more closely with people from the personnel department, they told me: "Palkan has his eye on you.

You will be a field wife, you must."

I asked how it is, and they answered: cook, wipe and caress."

A month later, the formed regiment was sent "for zero" (to Ukraine. — SR).

There, Margarita hoped to fend off the harassment of a high-ranking officer, who became more and more annoying, to save the wounded and be useful, but instead she found herself in the middle of a real nightmare, where only one law was valid - the word of the colonel.

Realizing that Margarita was not going to voluntarily become a field wife, he ordered to create unbearable conditions for her that would force her to agree to it.

"When we arrived behind zero, and I finally got to the camp, its commander told me that the colonel ordered me to be severely punished," says Margarita.

- I just lived on the street for a month.

When others spent the night in tents and huts, I slept on the ground, near the road, in a small forest.

Together with vole mice.

She tried to warm herself somehow, of course.

But when you die, you will never sleep.

They could leave them hungry.

They wanted to break me, in general, so that I would agree to sleep with him.

But I persevered, and when he realized this, I was immediately thrown into the artillery, also on his orders.

In the red zone, at the very front.

I thought I was going to die there."

"It was necessary to survive somehow"

According to Margarita, there were seven women aged 23 to 38 with her in the camp, and they tried to "put" each of them under platoon officers (platoon commanders. - SR).

"One for reconnaissance, the second for tankers, the third for infantry.

When we went there, of course, no one knew what was happening there.

And when we all understood, there was no way back, - says Margarita.

- I saw with my own eyes how the platoon officer shot "his" girlfriend, Svetlana.

They drank too much there, I don't know if there was any jealousy.

And they arranged it as if the Ukrainians had done it.

He shot himself in the hand, as if he was defending it, and three weeks later he returned from the hospital."

Svetlana survived the injury, but remained disabled.

She already had five operations, and the sixth is on the way.

Before everything happened, the platoon commander with the call sign "Akatsiya" who shot at Svetlana, beat her with his butt, there were witnesses to these beatings.

Margarita says that what happened left her in absolute shock.

All military women were married, but only Svetlana told her husband that they were being forced to sleep with officers.

As a result, almost all girls were broken and forced to provide sexual services by means of threats or bullying that make life unbearable.

Some of them, according to Margarita, even slept with several men.

But no one condemned them in such a situation, because they just had to somehow survive.

The women didn't try to escape to Russia, because they simply wouldn't be allowed to cross the border, says Margarita.

And their own, according to her, could easily be shot for such a thing.

Margarita, who told the Sever.Realia correspondent the story of sexual harassment in her regiment, claims that the officers also shot at the soldiers.

True, under other circumstances.

For those who did not want to go to the front line, they used a tried and tested technique - they kept them naked in a cold and damp cellar with rats.

But, if this did not help, the regiment commander's subordinates also had their own "original" method of influencing the defectors.

One of Margarita's most terrible memories is Russian soldiers who shot themselves in order to get out of the front line.

"They shot themselves in the legs because they were in the trenches for weeks and could no longer walk.

Their feet began to rot from constant dampness and frost.

When they filmed the Berets, I was simply horrified, I had never seen such a thing.

The blackness is solid with the flesh, dried with blood, even the fingers could no longer be distinguished.

All that remained was to amputate," recalls Margarita.

They tried to every fourth

Maxim Arzamastsev

, associate professor of HSE in St. Petersburg

, in his scientific work devoted to sexual harassment, cites statistics according to which every fourth female soldier in the Russian army was subjected to sexual harassment in one form or another.

Psychologist Igor Selivanov, who studies relations in military teams, recalls a story about how during the Chechen campaign in one of the Nampolit units, unmarried female contract workers had to be literally hidden from the officers who came to the unit for inspection.

The secretary of the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia,

Valentina Melnikova

, says that throughout the history of her human rights activities, which began back in the USSR, cases of women's appeals regarding sexual harassment or rape by service colleagues are rare.

As a rule, women choose not to declare such things.

According to Melnikova, not only women are subjected to sexual harassment in the Russian army, but also men, since in the military units "at the level of captains and majors" there are persons with a different sexual orientation, such complaints are always received from soldiers.

And the problem of homosexual relations in the military existed even in Soviet times.

The fact that a drunken officer in Ukraine could shoot a girl with whom he slept is not surprising, according to Melnikova, there were similar stories during the war in Chechnya.

"During the period of the second Chechen campaign, we had cases when officers got drunk and shot at their subordinates on some holidays," says the human rights defender.

- And there were very difficult cases.

One guy-officer was even sent to Germany for an operation and rehabilitation," says an interlocutor of Sever.Realii.