"Everyone should know that nothing will change without his or her efforts": Oleksandra Matviichuk
Public interview with human rights defender Oleksandra Matviichuk as part of the VOICES Exhibition at The Museum of Civilian Voices by Rinat Akhmetov Foundation.
The Museum of the History of Kyiv is hosting the VOICES Exhibition, a multidimensional display based on true stories of Ukrainians about the war, collected by The Museum of Civilian Voices by Rinat Akhmetov Foundation. The Museum of Civilian Voices collects and stores the world's largest collection of first-hand evidence of the war in Ukraine, which already includes more than 100,000 stories.
In April, as part of the exhibition, a public interview was held with Oleksandra Matviichuk, a human rights defender working on issues in Ukraine and the OSCE region. Oleksandra heads the human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties and coordinates the work of the initiative group Euromaidan SOS.
In February 2022, together with partners, she created the "Tribunal for Putin" initiative to document international crimes in all regions of Ukraine that have been targeted by russia's attacks. The same year, Oleksandra was recognized as one of the 25 most influential women in the world by Financial Times. And the "Center for Civil Liberties", headed by Oleksandra, won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The public interviews, part of the VOICES Exhibition, launched a series of cultural events in The Museum of Civilian Voices by Rinat Akhmetov Foundation aimed at preserving the memory of the war.
Anastasia Platonova, a cultural critic, analyst, and curator of this series of events, moderates the conversations.
Anastasiia Platonova: Lesia, let's start with the importance of documented war experiences, particularly in the context of international law and achieving post-war justice. What can these documented experiences and testimonies influence?
Oleksandra Matviichuk: This is the most documented war in mankind's history. And it is an opportunity to change the global approach to justice for war crimes. Let me explain what I mean. 30 years ago, during the Balkan wars, a very famous picture was taken. It shows a Serbian soldier with his back to the camera kicking an elderly woman who is lying on the floor.
There are two other people in civilian clothing lying next to this woman and a pool of blood, and when you look at this photo, you get the impression that these three civilians are dead, and this Serbian soldier is simply kicking their dead bodies. 30 years have passed. A group of international journalists decided to investigate the story behind the photo.
They used only open data, were not at the scene of the event, and identified this Serbian military man. They found out that he had never been prosecuted, had made a successful career as a DJ, and still plays at festivals and concerts to this day.
What do I mean to say by this example? Remarkable changes have occurred over these 30 years. Now, we have the technologies that enable us to recreate what happened, collect evidence, and identify the perpetrators, which we could not have dreamed of 30 years ago. We can change the approach I still encounter when speaking with presidents, parliamentarians, and government members during international trips.
They still subconsciously believe that when there is a war and a vast number of victims, it is simply impossible to provide justice or a chance for justice to every individual who has suffered. I want us to challenge this statement because it is possible now.
We, as mankind, are theoretically armed with the technical means to make this possible.
We can achieve this if we change the global attitude and set an ambitious goal that every human life matters, and therefore, we must work towards giving each person a chance for justice. Ukraine can become the first such precedent; we need to develop international law and the infrastructure for it to make this a reality.
Anastasiia Platonova: Let's talk about the enormous amount of effort that Ukrainian human rights defenders are currently making in the context of achieving post-war justice. What key processes would you note here?
Oleksandra Matviichuk: My team and I have been documenting russian war crimes for 10 years because we in Ukraine know better than anyone that this war did not begin in February 2022 but in February 2014, when Ukraine got a chance for democratic transformation after the fall of the authoritarian regime, we fought for this chance during the Revolution of Dignity. We got it at a high price.
Every year, we all remember more than a hundred people who were shot right in the centre of Kyiv. And in order to stop us on this way, russia launched an invasion and occupied Crimea and part of the eastern regions. Two years ago, it expanded this war to a full-scale one. And we are now in a situation where we honestly do not know and cannot tell ourselves whether we are at the end of this war, in the middle or only at the beginning of this war. Therefore, the justice issue is relevant, and I can tell you how our approach to documenting as a basis for further investigations and prosecutions has changed.
We were the first human rights organization to send mobile teams to Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk regions. The first group gathered and departed in late February 2014. At that time, to be honest, we didn't even realize that the war had broken out; we weren't ready for that. And the first crimes we documented were those that were clear to us as human rights defenders. These were kidnappings, torture, sexual violence and killing of civilians in the occupied territories, as well as politically motivated persecution.
I personally interviewed more than a hundred people during those years who had survived in russian captivity, and they told terrible stories about how they had been beaten, raped, confined in wooden boxes, had their limbs cut off, had their nails torn out, had their kneecaps smashed with a hammer, and had been tortured with electricity by passing it through their genitals. I will never forget one woman telling me how they tried to take out her eye with a spoon. These are terrifying stories.
We had sent dozens of reports to the UN, the OSCE, the Council of Europe, the European Union, but nothing was changing. I began losing the significance of our work as documenters, because I realized that I was interviewing a new person, and at that very second everything was going on in the 143 places of captivity that we had identified in the occupied territories at that time.
I'm sure that the audience in Ukraine has heard about the global campaign "Save Oleh Sentsov." That was our response. We realized that if international organizations do not work and if legal instruments cannot be relied upon, then we will use the energy of people all over the world to make these instruments work. We started with simultaneous demonstrations in more than 35 countries around the world. It was indeed a global campaign joined by many people in Ukraine.
What changes with the launch of a full-scale invasion? The evil that we have been documenting multiplies at one point all over the country and becomes more brutal, more intense. That is, we face a huge number of crimes.
How should we respond to this? We are joining forces with dozens of regional organizations, creating a network of local documenters that covers the entire Ukraine, including the occupied territories. We have set ourselves a goal: we will try to document every criminal episode committed in the smallest village of every region of Ukraine.
It is clear that the goal is ambitious, but in two years, we have documented more than 68,000 episodes of war crimes. And this is a huge number that represents the tip of the iceberg. Because russia commits war crimes as a method of warfare. russia uses pain as a tool. It deliberately puts civilians in pain to break our resistance and occupy the country.
Anastasiia Platonova: What is Ukraine's progress during the full-scale war in the context of international advocacy? What are the main pain points you see? Have we managed to achieve qualitative changes in knowledge and understanding not only about this war but also about Ukraine in general?
Oleksandra Matviichuk: I don't think I'll be wrong if I say that the state of Ukraine and the people in Ukraine appeared on the mental map of the world. But our appearance on this map comes at a very high price. A huge number of people are contributing to international advocacy to ensure that this place is fixed, not changed, given that, unfortunately, the russian-Ukrainian war is not the only war. And the world's focus shifts, but we need to ensure that the meanings we generate through our struggle will be represented in this mental map of the world.
I will share a story that I find illustrative. This is the story of an American museum, a quite famous one, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the story of a painting by Degas called Russian Dancers. This picture represents girls in Ukrainian national costumes and flower crowns. Even russians, looking at this picture, realize that these are not russian dancers.
Of course, museum workers and artists in Ukraine wrote to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and drew the administration's attention to the fact that something wrong was going on. It is necessary to explain this name, to show this colonial prism, when everything that happened in our part of the world was russian. React to this in some way.
For the sake of historical justice. The museum ignored all that for many years. It was only after the full-scale invasion that they changed the name of the picture. It is now called: Dancers in Ukrainian Costumes. Maybe they still think that these are russian dancers who just put on Ukrainian costumes, but this is already the first important step.
This is a process, and it is a process of rethinking and understanding, even by Western intellectuals, academic centres, and artistic circles, that everything they thought they knew about our part of the world, not only about Ukraine, is what they were told through the russian prism.
And in the russian prism, we simply did not exist as a people with our own culture, language, literature, and ambitions. We are visualizing ourselves on this map now, but we still need to make huge efforts to ensure that the meanings that belong to us are adequately reflected there.
Anastasiia Platonova: How does what Western Europeans read, listen to, and see about the war in Ukraine influence systemic changes in understanding what is happening in Ukraine and generally in the world?
Oleksandra Matviichuk: I would say two things. The first, more local one, is that the world is shocked by russia's cruelty. It is discovering it for itself. The world did not learn, recoiled, and did not pay attention to the fact that the same methods were used earlier in Chechnia, Moldova, Georgia, Syria, Mali, and Libya. And this tradition of impunity, which russia has enjoyed for decades, has become the cause of the horror that is now part of our everyday life.
I always give this example: while after the Second World War, European nations, horrified by the millions of deaths and devastated countries, took decisive steps, establishing the Nuremberg Tribunal and punishing Nazi war criminals, the Soviet GULAG has not ever been condemned or punished.
So, it is no surprise that the whole world commemorated the end of the Second World War with the words "Never again" in russia, as we all know - "We can repeat!" In fact, it is a repetition of unlearned historical lessons, an unpunished evil that grows. And now, being appalled, we have a chance to break this circle of impunity that russia has enjoyed for decades. I will not say that it is easy, it is very difficult, but we got a chance, we did not have it before, and it is a great luxury to have a chance.
Foreign journalists often ask me what I think about the fatigue of Western societies from the russian war in Ukraine. I say we should call things by their proper names. How can you get tired of the russian war in Ukraine if you are in Geneva? Or in Paris? Or in Washington?
When you have the possibility to send your children to kindergarten without worrying about when the next shelling will start. When you make important decisions, not in a bomb shelter. And in general, you have the luxury of planning your time because you have a long perspective and you don't live in the constant shadow of fear of violence against yourself. Let's call things by their proper names. This means that it is not fatigue; it is something different. I venture to say that this is a fear of taking decisive action.
Developed democracies are societies of generations that have never seen war and who have inherited the system of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law from their parents. They have never fought for them and therefore do not understand their value. They take it for granted. They have become consumers of these values. They see freedom as the ability to choose between cheeses in the supermarket.
When you face a challenge that goes beyond this established, calm way of life, you are reluctant to go beyond your comfort zone. And now, unfortunately, this reluctance is not only present in Western societies at the level of these generations, both among ordinary people and politicians, who are very slowly stepping out of their comfort zone, leading to delays in our progress. We received the first modern tank a year after the full-scale invasion.
Why do I think this is not fatigue but a fear of taking decisive action, which is based on a lack of understanding and fear of the future? Because when we say: help Ukraine win, give us everything we need now to win in terms of military aid, in terms of sanctions, in terms of political decisions, - if Ukraine is to win, then russia is to lose.
What should be done with a 140-million-person country that possesses nuclear weapons after a defeat? You can't say that it doesn't exist, that it's a black hole; otherwise, it will take on the properties of a black hole and start sucking everything in. We need to have some kind of long-term strategy for transformation and reorganization, even though everyone understands that this will not be the best case scenario, like the Allied flag over the Reichstag in the Second World War.
What should be done with a nuclear state? There is no answer. There is no long-term strategy. There is fear; there is an unwillingness to think in such terms, and there is an unwillingness to leave the comfort zone. The only thing we can put up against this now is that it will happen anyway. Because russia wants to drag us into the past. The future will come, regardless of putin's wishes.
And we have already seen this in the history, because all of us in Ukraine know very well President Bush's speech, the Chicken Speech, the infamous one, and this reluctance of Western democracies to help the collapse of the Soviet Union and, despite this, the Soviet republics gaining independence, which they had been fighting for over the centuries, including Ukraine.
Because, what will happen if the Soviet Union collapses? There is no strategy. But it happened. Regardless of whether the West was ready for it. And Ukraine will win. We simply do not know when this will happen. But it is inevitable.
Anastasiia Platonova: How can Ukraine and Ukrainians cope with the need to reset the system of international law?
Oleksandra Matviichuk: I think that all people in the world have one common goal. Perhaps, except for those who live in militarized societies and follow the will of those who rule them. Because living in fear really develops a certain paradigm of thinking: I am a small person, I have no influence on anything, everything is decided without us, the government knows better, if russia started the war, then russia must win. I'm quoting the results of focus groups, which show this thinking of a small person who does not want to take responsibility.
But for the most part, all people want to live in peace, they want their children to be safe, they want the society and their family in particular to be capable and happy. So, if we want to prevent wars in the future, we must hold accountable those states and leaders who are starting these wars now. And it seems to be logical. But throughout the entire history of mankind, and there have been many wars in it, we have had only one such precedent. And that is the Nuremberg Tribunal.
All the other tribunals you have heard of, and I emphasize this, like the Yugoslav, Rwandan, the Special Court for Sierra Leone and others, are not tribunals for starting wars or for beginning to kill people. These are tribunals for killing people disproportionately, not according to the rules of war, with excessive cruelty, that is, for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. If they had been killing each other according to the rules, there would have been no tribunals.
That is why only the Nuremberg Tribunal is such a precedent. And that is why the international community, decision-making politicians, and heads of state still look at the world through the prism of this tribunal. And what was it? It was a trial of the victors over a regime that had fallen. The conclusion follows from this: Ukraine, win the war, and you will have justice. And we are making enormous efforts to convince the international community and these particular politicians that we are living in a new century.
The Nuremberg Tribunal is a very important step in establishing law and justice, but it is the last century. We have to move on. We must take justice out of the dependence on how and when wars end.
Because a lot of things have changed in the world since the Second World War. The UN system was established, international treaties were signed, and the concept of aggression was defined. We shall not wait and create this special tribunal for the crime of aggression now, and bring putin, highest officials and the military authorities of russia to justice.
I will end this answer by saying that we must have patience. This is about the psychological aspect of this work and the need for self-reflection. Let us first address our claims to the international community to ourselves. We were also not super active and super supportive when the war in Syria broke out. I remember this huge scandal when the idea first came up: let's take in Syrian refugees and build some kind of settlement for them. It is obvious that Ukrainian citizens were not ready to open their homes.
Those people who protested against this are very likely to have become refugees themselves. We have 7.5 million of them. That is, we now have a warm welcome, not without problems, but generally a warm welcome that we ourselves were not ready to provide to people who suffered from another war.
I do not say this in international arenas, but I remind Ukrainians of this. We need self-reflection. This will give us the patience to explain things to other people because people are not evil. People are not even indifferent. We just need to reach out, and this requires patience and time.
Anastasiia Platonova: On a purely human level, how can one come to terms with this infinite amount of evil, violence, injustice and impunity? How do you find the strength to keep fighting, even knowing how much pain is still around and how much evil is still unpunished?
Oleksandra Matviichuk: I think that we have to counter with a strategy of justice, which must be supported by our actions to establish it. I have mentioned that from the very first years, we have been documenting the testimonies of people who were released from captivity. The questionnaire is standard, and there is a question: Have you contacted government authorities? Many people answered "no". And when I asked them why, they said: we understand that the government authorities cannot reach our offenders, who are in the occupied territory or in russia, so we do not want to waste our efforts on all these bureaucratic and legal procedures.
And then I continued: but you came to me. And then you realize that even these people who have gone through hell and do not want to go through it again in testimonies, investigative experiments or procedural investigative actions, they need to restore not only their destroyed lives, destroyed future, destroyed families. They need to restore their shattered faith that justice is possible, even if it is delayed.
And that is why they have come to you. This story needs to be recorded at least somewhere, even if they say they don't believe in justice. After these years of work, I realize that the concept of justice is multidimensional. And each of us imagines it very differently.
The people I talked to who experienced various types of crimes - some of them understand justice as an opportunity to see their offenders behind bars. And some of them - as an opportunity to receive compensation. For some, it is an opportunity to find out the truth about what happened to their loved ones. Families of the missing, mothers say: I would like to know where the grave is, and this already would be a huge relief. Others see justice as an opportunity to be heard in public, to have their story heard.
To obtain official recognition that what happened to him, to her, to the family was not just immoral but illegal. We need to work very hard to develop a strategy of justice that takes into account all these people's needs.
Anastasiia Platonova: If we are talking about a common understanding of justice, then we, as a political nation, will obviously have to agree on what exactly we mean by this concept.
Oleksandra Matviichuk: It's part of a broader issue of how we should talk to each other about these different life experiences that we endure. Because there is such an idea that war unites. It's true that an existential threat forces a particular species to unite, especially when they are under threat of being destroyed. And we realize that this is a genocidal war for our existence. On the other hand, war fragments people a lot.
It radicalizes our vision: everything becomes either black or white. It makes these fault lines so deep, so emotional, so traumatic that it can tear society apart from the inside, and you don't even need to wait for putin to attack. We can get to the point where people will pour out the hatred they cannot pour out on russians on each other.
We have a real threat of a split based on different life experiences. Sociologists can see it. And this is not limited to such categories as refugees, people living in the occupied territories, people who joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine and people in the rear.
These fault lines and these different life experiences that run through each of these categories, is fragmenting and atomizing, and we need to build bridges. This needs to be done now. And this relates not only to the question of how we see common justice, but also to the question of how we see common life within our constitutional borders.
Anastasiia Platonova: Why is it important to remember? Both at the level of individual, collective and social memory and at the level of documented experiences of war, which then become the basis of metanarratives within the country and help the world to know about this war and the dramatic events that change the course of world history.
Oleksandra Matviichuk: I will begin answering this difficult question with a story that does not belong to me but to my colleagues in the public sector, who made such tours to Eastern Ukraine in order to enlist the support of local communities at the beginning of the work to restore the historical memory of the Holodomor.
They invented the following method: when you come to a city or a region to talk to the authorities about it, they have to go and have dinner or coffee before the official meetings. And to talk about their past. And suddenly, someone somewhere would always say: I know, I heard that my family also survived the Holodomor. It was a time when pro-russian narratives and corresponding political forces had power in those communities. And this return to their own history enabled my colleagues to succeed and advance further.
It is very important to remember that certain things have become our culture, and certain things have never become. I, for instance, tell the foreigners that I work with the consequences of russian culture. Because for you, russian culture is Dostoievskyi, ballet, Chaikovskyi, despite his Ukrainian roots. This is russian culture for you. And for me, russian culture is Bucha. Because culture is not just literature or paintings.
These are established behaviour patterns in a particular society. And if you don't remember, if you forgot or wished to forget and didn't reflect, it becomes a pattern. And it is quite a dangerous thing. It is dangerous both to keep silent about what happened to you because then the abuser will repeat it, and it is dangerous not to let yourself know that you have done this evil.
I will finish my answer with what I think is a brilliant sketch by a journalist who came to a small German town after the Second World War. There was one of these terrible concentration camps in this city, where many people lost their lives. He asked the locals, and they said: we didn't know. We didn't know, we simply didn't know what was going on. God, what a horror, it's really hard to believe. He asked: how could you not know?
Because he was standing there, he could see that concentration camp, he could see its chimneys, and he realized that the smoke from these chimneys was billowing to the city. You can't fail to notice this; you can't help but ask yourself what is going on there. And that woman he was talking to gave a brilliant answer: we never looked in that direction. And he concluded: yes, it's easy not to know if you remember well where you should not look. Therefore, it is very important to remember.
Guest: What can each of us do to help you?
Oleksandra Matviichuk: Everyone's actions are critically needed now. You know better what you can do. Being doctors, journalists, or housewives, it doesn't matter who a person has power. And this was in my Nobel speech. I spoke about my experience as a lawyer who has been dealing with the protection of human rights and human dignity for many, many years, and who finds herself in a situation where legal instruments do not work, I cannot rely on them, but I know that despite this, I can always rely on people.
Yesterday, I received a call from a journalist from the United States who asked me how we "broke through" the $61 billion package in the House of Representatives that had been blocked for more than six months. What was the strategy, after all? At some point, I said: there was no single strategy. Everyone did what they could. I understood how to explain it to him. I say, you know, during the Revolution of Dignity, this feeling of learned helplessness was overcome in different ways. And the artists came up with a series of posters.
One of them depicted a drop with a caption: "I am a drop in the ocean". This meant: yes, I am a human being, I am not the Lord God, I cannot move this concrete wall on my own. But I know for sure that I am not alone and together we are a drop in the ocean, and oceans can tear down walls. And that nothing will change without my efforts.
