UN envoy admits fabricating claim of Viagra-fueled rape as ‘Russian military strategy’

UN Special Representative Pramila Patten has been exposed for fabricating her claim that Russia was supplying its troops with Viagra as a part of its “military strategy” in the Ukraine conflict.

Read the full article on The Grayzone.

UN Special Representative Pramila Patten has been exposed for fabricating her claim that Russia was supplying its troops with Viagra as a part of its “military strategy” in the Ukraine conflict. The widely publicized lie was recycled from baseless NATO propaganda deployed during its 2011 Libyan regime change war.

In a November 10 call with Russian pranksters Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexey Stolyarov, better known by their aliases Vovan and Lexus, UN Envoy on Sexual Violence Pramila Patten admitted that there was no evidence to back up her widely publicized claims from October that the Russian government was using Viagra-fueled mass rape as a weapon of war.

During the call, Vovan and Lexus pressed Patten on whether she had any proof of her incendiary allegation. Clearly flustered, Patten responded:  “No, no, no. And I don’t — like I said, it’s not my role to go and investigate. I sit in New York, in an office in New York, and I have an advocacy — and I have an advocacy mandate. My role is not to investigate.”

She continued: “The investigation is going on by the Human Rights Monitoring Team and the International Commission of Inquiry. In their reports so far, there’s nothing about Viagra.”

Patten told the pranksters that the claim was relayed to her “from survivors and service providers” and “in the presence of” high-ranking Ukrainian officials while she was in Kiev in early May. 

The fake news fiasco began on October 14 when Patten accused the Russian Armed Forces of incorporating rape and abuse of ED drugs into its official battlefield strategy.

“All the indications are there,” Patten, a Mauritian-born lawyer, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on October 14. 

“When women are held for days and raped, when you start to rape little boys and men, when you see a series of genital mutilations, when you hear women testify about Russian soldiers equipped with Viagra, it’s clearly a military strategy,” the UN envoy confidently proclaimed.

A September 27 UN Report on the Ukraine conflict has accused Russian troops of carrying out an array hideous human rights abuses, including acts of sexual violence, between the months of February and July 2022. Though that report covered the period of time that Patten was inside Ukraine, it made no mention of Viagra.

Yet, within hours of Patten’s discussion with AFP, media outlets from CNN to Yahoo News had produced their own rewrites of her remarks and generated a series of salacious headlines about Russia’s conduct in the Ukraine war. In an op-ed celebrating a potential “massive” and “life-affirming” orgy being organized in Kiev, the Slovenian celebrity philosopher Slavoj Žižek uncritically cited Patten’s poorly-sourced Viagra claims, writing that “the truly uncivilized sex acts are those being committed by Russian soldiers and their leaders.”

“Russia is giving soldiers Viagra to rape Ukrainians: UN official,” read one such dispatch, filed in the New York Post. According to Business Insider, “Russian soldiers are supplied with Viagra to rape Ukrainian women and ‘dehumanize them,” UN official claims.” Meanwhile, CNN declared “Russia using rape as ‘military strategy’ in Ukraine: UN envoy.”

The mainstream press that reprinted Patten’s lurid claims without skepticism failed to read the UN report which contained lengthy sections on the topic of sexual violence in the war. Despite her claim that Russian soldiers were “equipped with Viagra,” the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) made no reference to the drug — nor any other pharmaceutical prescribed to treat ED — in its September report on the Ukraine conflict. In fact, the OHCHR website contains no references to Viagra throughout this entire year.

The report merely states that “OHCHR documented 9 cases of rape” between February 1st and the 31st of July this year; hardly the Rape of Nanjing redux insinuated in CNN’s headline.

In falsely accusing Russian military commanders of juicing their troops on Viagra to carry out mass rape, Patten dusted off the Libya regime change playbook and deployed one of its most discredited – but effective – propaganda set-pieces. 

Read the full article on The Grayzone.