Ukraine must be supported until victory - or we will all pay the price, warns Nobel laureate

The joint winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, the Ukrainian human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk (picture - credit EP/Alain Rolland) , has been in Brussels to address the International Conference on Accountability and Justice for Ukraine. She also took part in a High-Level Conference on Human Rights at the European Parliament, where she was interviewed by our Political Editor Nick Powell.

When Russia launched its full invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago, Oleksandra Matviichuk had already been documenting war crimes for eight years. As she reminded me, Russia started the war in 2013 with its illegal annexation of Crimea and by arming a rebellion in Donbas. It was a response to how protests in Kyiv’s Independence Square, the Maidan, ended the corrupt rule of the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.

“Ukraine obtained the chance of a free democratic transition, after the collapse of the authoritarian regime during the Revolution of Dignity” was how Oleksandra Matviichuk put it. “In all those eight years we had to fulfil parallel tasks: first we had to defend our country from Russian aggression and try to help people who live in occupied territories, in a grey zone without any possibility to protect themselves; in parallel, we had to do some democratic reforms in different fields in order to go further on [the path set] by the Revolution of Dignity”.

She told me that success in getting Ukraine back onto a democratic, pro-European path made it inevitable that Russia would eventually resort to the only response it had left, launching a full-scale war. “Why people were shocked, not just in Ukraine but abroad, was because of what I think is a very human nature not to accept reality. Don’t believe in the bad scenario, it is magical thinking -don’t think about it, it will not happen. It is just magical thinking, it won’t work”.

I asked her if such magical thinking had weakened the western response to events in Crimea and Donbas, that after the initial shock the EU and other actors behaved as if the problem had been contained, although Ukrainians were fighting and dying the entire time. “It’s the historic responsibility of politicians”, she responded. “I don’t know what historians in the future will call this period, but it was very visible that politicians tried to evade their responsibility to solve the problem, under the illusion that this problem will vanish”.

Nevertheless, Oleksandra Matviichuk was clear that her life and work had been transformed since Russian launched its full invasion, they were not simply a continuation of what she was already doing. “The task in war is totally different in reality. Even if you can predict that a war will start on a large scale, you can’t be prepared because to know is completely different from experience. That’s why I can say that my life was broken, as were the lives of millions of people. I mean everything that we called normal life and took for granted disappeared in one moment. The possibility to go to work, to hug your loved ones, to meet with friends and colleagues in a cafe, to have a family dinner, disappeared”.

In her professional life, the task of documenting war crimes has become a massive challenge, because of how Russia has fought the war. “Russia deliberately inflicted immense pain on civilians in their methods of how to break the resistance of people and occupy the country. This means that it is very difficult from a professional and from a human point of view to document such crimes. [There’s] an enormous amount because we don’t just document violations of the Geneva Conventions, we document human pain -and we face an enormous level of human pain”.

Despite the horrors to which she bears witness, Oleksandra Matviichuk says there cannot be any regret that Ukraine stopped kowtowing to Russia in 2013. “No, no! Look, to have a chance to fight for your freedom … is a luxury to have a chance”, she insisted. “The future is not clear and not guaranteed but at least we have a historic chance to succeed. And we have a responsibility to future generations to use it properly”.

“Ukraine needs international support, the challenge that we face cannot be solved [only] inside our borders. This is not just a war between two states, this is a war between two systems, authoritarianism and democracy. Putin publicly declares that he fights with the west and Ukraine is just [the starting] point. So, I hope that it’s clear to political elites of different countries that it will not be possible to just stop Putin in Ukraine, he will go further. At the current moment, they pay with their resources, financial resources and other kinds of resources, but it’s nothing compared with when you pay with the lives of your people”.

Her argument is that although Ukraine absolutely needs the support of the west, actually the west needs to support Ukraine in its own interests, in order to draw a line with Russia. “I know that it’s human nature to understand that a war is going on only when the bombs are falling on your head. But war has different dimensions, which start before military [action]. Economic dimension, values dimension, informational dimension. This war has already broken through the borders of the European Union, regardless of whether we have the courage to admit it or not”.

“Victory for Ukraine means not just to push Russian troops out from the country, to restore international order and our territorial integrity, to release people who live in Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk and other regions which are under Russian occupation. Victory for Ukraine also means to succeed in the democratic transition of our country. 10 years ago, millions of Ukrainians protested on the streets against a corrupt and authoritarian government, just for a chance to build a country where the rights of everybody are protected, the government is accountable, the judiciary is independent, the police do not beat students who are peacefully demonstrating”.

She reminded me that when the police were gunning down peaceful protestors in the main square of Kyiv, many of the victims were flying European as well as Ukrainian flags. “Probably we are the only nation in the world whose representatives have died under … European flags. So, we paid a high price for this chance and Russia started this war to stop us, to increase this price sky high. We feel our responsibility to succeed”.

Apart from arming Ukraine, the EU and its allies have imposed successive rounds of sanctions on Russia but In Oleksandra Matviichuk’s view they have not been as effective as they should have been. “I live in Kyiv and my native city is regularly shelled by Russian rockets and Iranian drones. Russia can produce and buy these rockets and drones only because Russia still has money. It is so because Russia has found a way to bypass the sanctions regime. We have not just to introduce sanctions but to implement sanctions properly and rely on the responsibility of EU member states to do it”, she said.

“We found in Russian tanks and Russian drones on the battlefield -broken Russian tanks and drones- western components and western technology. So, western companies continue to deliver their products to Russia, which are used to kill Ukrainians. Sanctions are an effective tool, but we have to implement it and start to prosecute and punish companies and countries that bypass sanctions”.

Despite the immense suffering of the past two years, she sees no point in even contemplating a negotiated end to the fighting, when Ukraine has not completely liberated its territory. “Putin doesn’t want peace. All discussion about negotiation is wishful thinking that Putin wants to stop. Putin wants to reach his historic goal to restore the Russian Empire… this wishful thinking is not a strategy. Putin will stop only when he is stopped. We know this from the recent past”, she argued.

“When Putin occupied Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk regions, Ukraine had zero chance of regaining this territory. So, did Russia stop? Russia used this time to build a powerful military base in the Crimean Peninsula, Russia regrouped its troops, appealed against sanctions, invested a lot of money in the informational landscape of different countries of the world. Russia prepared and then started to attack again”.

Oleksandra Matviichuk believes that not only does Ukraine have a duty to fight on, it has no alternative. She fears that the international community sometimes does not understand that there is no going back to trying to coexist with Putin. “They want to return to the past, but the past does not exist [anymore]”, she said, arguing that Ukraine had to accept that reality and so should its allies.

“This war has a very clear genocidal character. Putin openly says that there is no Ukrainian nation, there is no Ukrainian language, there is no Ukrainian culture. Russian propagandists take him at his word and say on television channels that Ukrainians either have to be re-educated as Russians or killed.  We document as human rights defenders how Russian troops deliberately exterminate in occupied territories, mayors, journalists, artists, priests, volunteers and any people active in their community. How they ban the Ukrainian language and culture, how they destroyed and broke Ukrainian heritage, how they have taken Ukrainian children from their parents and sent them to Russia to re-educate them as Russian citizens”, she said, spelling out why there is no choice for Ukrainians.

“If we stop fighting, there will be no more us. I also want to tell you what the implication will be if international support decreased, for the international community itself. What Putin tried to convince the whole world was that countries with a strong military potential and nuclear weapons can do whatever they want. If Russia succeeds, certain leaders in the world will have the same strategy and we will have an increasing number of nuclear states”.

So, democracies had no choice but to arm Ukraine and to build up their arsenals, because the international order is broken. “Once again, we are grateful for all support but I myself prefer to give everything which I have, I am not a rich person but everything which I have, not to pay with the lives of my loved ones”.

Oleksandra Matviichuk assured me that most Ukrainians feel the same way, a view borne out not just by conversations in her own social circle but by surveys of popular opinion. “The people, the vast majority of the population, are confident that we have to continue the fight for our freedom in all senses. The alternative is much more horrible”.

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