What evidence has been collected about Russia's war crimes in Ukraine? Oleksandra Matviychuk is the head of the Kiev-based “Center for Civil Liberties“, which received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Is there one image that, for you, symbolizes all the past years of the war in Ukraine?
Olexandra Matviychuk: “Different images come to mind, many of which I would like to forget. But if I try to reduce them to one thing, it would be April 2022. We were getting information about what was happening in Bucha, Motyzhyn, Irpen. When the Russian troops were pushed out of the area, we saw the bodies of people lying in the streets. We found people killed in their own homes, in mass graves, entire families with children shot.“
Justice for the people of Ukraine
Olexandra is a lawyer who documents war crimes: “The goal of our team is to return the names of those who died and were injured in this war. We are focused on achieving justice. Our task is to document every war crime committed in even the smallest village in Ukraine. "We specialize in the problems of people in captivity, and mainly civilians," says Matviychuk.
Is the number of people who are in Russian captivity known?
O. Matviychuk: I can name some official figures, but I can neither confirm nor deny them. Last year, the coordination headquarters reported 16,000 illegally held civilians. We have received over 4,000 applications from relatives of civilians who were either illegally detained or are in captivity. The scale of these phenomena allows me, as a lawyer, to say that these are crimes against humanity. This has already been confirmed repeatedly by the reports of the international commission established by the UN. I hope that the third case that will be brought by the International Criminal Court will be precisely for this type of war crimes: kidnapping, torture, sexual violence and illegal detention of people. Crimes against humanity are characterized by two features: it must be a large-scale crime against the civilian population and it must be organized. I would say that this type of crime has become part of the culture of the Russian army, the Russian special services and the occupation authorities.
Unimaginable crimes
I will give an example - no one in Bucha can forget the smell of corpses that wafted through the city. It was simply unimaginable horror - no one could have been prepared for something like this, no matter how many war crimes they had documented. In April, many foreign journalists worked there, they wrote a huge amount of materials. Everyone was in shock. And how did Putin react? He called the brigade that was in Bucha and awarded it. He gave the signal - you can do whatever you want: kill, rape, including children, burn people alive, and I will give you a medal for that.
Many sign contracts and go to war for five million rubles. People justify them because they have never seen so much money, and their lives are worth nothing – they go to war out of desperation. Do you feel sorry for them?
O. Matviychuk: I think that even in the most difficult situations a person still has a will, has a responsibility and cannot give them up – he can say “yes“ or “no“, especially if he has to choose whether to sign a contract.
Let's suppose that something in Moscow starts to change. Are you afraid that in this case they will tell human rights activists – yes, you are our moral tuning fork, but real politics is something else entirely?
O. Matviychuk: People who talk about peace do not understand three things. First - peace is the freedom to live without fear of violence and a long perspective for peace, which the occupied do not have. The second thing is the perspectives. Some people say - let's freeze the conflict and solve these problems in five-ten years. But they do not understand one thing - if the problems are not solved, they grow even more. And the third important thing is the fairness of justice - it has a huge impact on the current situation.
These people should not feel unpunished
Hundreds of people who survived Russian captivity tell how safe and unpunished those who tortured them felt. They were one hundred percent sure that they would never end up in the dock. If at least some of the people begin to doubt that they may not escape responsibility, they will not hide behind the abstract Putin, this will have a chilling effect on the brutality of their actions. And this means that we can save thousands of human lives. It is already being said that these are Putin's crimes, but we know many people by name - it was not Putin who tortured, killed and raped in Bucha.
How do you assess the negotiations in Istanbul, in which Zelensky agreed to participate. After all, they provide arguments precisely to the supporters of the position of “peace at any cost“?
Oh. Matviychuk: This is an imitation process, from which as many useful things as possible should be extracted, especially in the humanitarian sphere: exchange of prisoners, return of the bodies of the dead. I could not say that this does not make sense at all, because we are talking about human lives. And for Ukraine, unlike Russia, human lives are of great importance. We must protect people. But it is naive to think that Putin started the war and buried thousands of Russians in it just so that they would write about him in history textbooks. He started a full-scale invasion in order to occupy and destroy Ukraine and continue on.
Neither human nor legal laws allow it
Putin became a victim of his own propaganda. He wrote so many historical opuses about the fact that we are one people that he believed in it. At this stage, the people of Ukraine need justice. But the people of Russia also need justice. They must finally understand that this is abnormal - neither by legal nor by human laws is it permissible to invade another country, kill the people there, forbid them from speaking their native language, take their children and take them to Russia to raise them there as Russians.
Konstantin Eggert talks to Oleksandra Matviychuk.