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1 of 3 Photo: Henrik Montgomery/TT
It took a large-scale invasion for the outside world to wake up.
Oleksandra Matvijtyuk, whose work this year was awarded both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Right Livelihood Prize, has been documenting serious war crimes for eight years. Only now is the world listening.
– The passivity means that the Russians have started to believe that they can do what they want, she says.
Stockholm’s November bustle is a welcome break. Inside the hotel in the Old Town it is warm and safe, at home in the apartment in Kyiv, Oleksandra Matvijtyuk has had neither light nor heat for three days.
– Putin has deliberately destroyed Ukraine’s economy and now he is destroying our civil infrastructure. And it’s only getting colder, she says.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the organization Oleksandra Matvijtyuk leads, the Center for Civil Liberties, has documented over 24,000 war crimes. It is still only the tip of the iceberg. The violence and war crimes have become part of the Russian culture of war, she says.
– It is a deliberate strategy sanctioned by the highest political leadership. When Russian forces withdrew from the Kiev region and we found dead bodies scattered across the streets, dead people lying in their own gardens, what did Putin do? He gave a medal to the military unit stationed in Butja.
Eight years of uninterrupted war
The work is heavy, sometimes bordering on unbearable. Since 2014, Oleksandra Matvijtyuk has personally interviewed hundreds of people who survived captivity. Most often, she forbids herself to feel after so as not to break down. For the first seven years, it felt hopeless, like no one would ever be brought to justice for the abuse she documented.
– They tell how they were abused, raped, had their fingers cut off… One woman told how they gouged out her eyes with a spoon. These are absolutely horrific stories and have been going on for years. We submitted countless reports – to the UN, to the Council of Europe, to the EU. Nothing happened, she says and continues:
– For eight years this war was allowed to go on undisturbed – only after a large-scale invasion did the civilized world finally understand.
The guilty must be punished
Vladimir Putin’s illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014 was “a test that the outside world failed”, says Matvijtjuk. The world’s democracies continued to do business with Putin – buying oil and gas, building Nord Stream 2, turning a blind eye to the atrocities of war.
– The passivity means that the Russians have started to believe that they can do what they want. We will never have lasting peace in our region unless we break the cycle of impunity. Those who committed these crimes with their own hands must – as well as politicians and military commanders – be held accountable.
39-year-old Oleksandra Matjivtyuk, basically a lawyer, says that the war has clearly shown that the international system for peace and security does not work. In the end, a state’s survival depends solely on its military capacity or whether it belongs to a military alliance, she believes.
– It is an illusion that we have some kind of international architecture that protects us. We need to restructure the entire international system, create a system that can stop and punish war criminals.
Difficult with family
Since the large-scale invasion in February, reports have pointed to the Ukrainian side also being guilty of war crimes. The Center for Civil Liberties also documents Ukrainian abuses, but the overwhelming majority are committed by Russian soldiers, according to the organization.
Oleksandra Matvijtyuk never imagined that she would work documenting war crimes. The war has fundamentally changed her, she says, and involved bitter personal sacrifices.
– My husband and I have no children yet. When you’ve worked on torture cases for eight years, it’s frankly difficult, she says and continues:
– When Russia invaded, I thought it’s okay that I haven’t had children yet, that I waited, because the circle of people I need to worry about is therefore smaller. But in the future. When a child is born in Ukraine, it is an important symbolic act – the victory of life over death.
Facts
Oleksandra Matvijtyuk
Oleksandra Matvijtyuk was born in 1983 in Boyarka in the Kiev region, in the then Soviet Republic of the Ukrainian SSR.
As a newly graduated law student, she started working for the then newly started organization Center for Civil Liberties (CCL), which she leads today. In the early years, CCL focused on legislation aimed at making Ukraine more democratic and increasing popular influence over the country’s judicial and police systems. During the Euromaidan protests of 2013–2014, which led to the ouster of then-President Viktor Yanukovych, CCL assisted arrested protesters with legal support and documented abuses committed by Yanukovych’s security forces.
After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, CCL began documenting cases of political persecution in the Crimean peninsula and crimes committed by the Russian-backed separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk. Work on documenting war crimes intensified after Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
In September, Oleksandra Matvijtyuk and the Center for Civil Liberties were awarded the 2022 Right Livelihood Prize. In October, it was announced that CCL, together with the Russian organization Memorial and the Belarusian democracy profile Ales Byalyatski, will also be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.
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