Oleksandra Matviichuk, pictured during the Hay Festival of Cartagena de Indias 2023.Daniel Mordzonski
When she is traveling outside of Ukraine, the first thing that human rights activist Oleksandra Matviichuk, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2022, does when she wakes up, is to look at her mobile.
And she usually does it multiple times throughout the night.
And she always feels the same fear of finding out that a Russian attack has killed one of her closest relatives.
Even in the Colombian Caribbean, at the Hay Festival in Cartagena de Indias where this interview was held at the end of January, war travels with it.
She never leaves him.
Director of the Center for Civil Liberties, born in Kiev 39 years ago, she was one of the Nobel laureates last year along with the Russian human rights organization Memorial and imprisoned Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski.
Committed to freedom and human rights in Ukraine, the Center was founded in 2007 and since 2014, when Crimea was annexed, it has been dedicated to documenting Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
With the invasion, in February of last year, her work has increased exponentially.
Her goal is to one day bring President Vladimir Putin, and all the perpetrators, before an international tribunal, but she also believes it is essential to build a collective memory: to document the enormous human suffering caused by the war.
And never forget.
Ask.
What did she feel when she was told that she had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?
Answer.
I couldn't believe it.
A week before we had been given the alternative Nobel Peace Prize, which is awarded by the Swedish Parliament, and I couldn't imagine that they were going to give us the Nobel Peace Prize, because it seems like something reserved for very important and famous people.
We are defenders of human rights, we are not famous.
But then I began to feel an enormous responsibility because for decades no one had listened to human rights defenders in our part of the world.
Maybe in the UN, in some countries, but not in the places where decisions are made.
The Nobel allows our voice to be heard.
More information
Nobel Peace Prize for the Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski and two human rights organizations from Russia and Ukraine
Q.
Your organization's job is to document Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
Is your goal ever to bring the leadership of Russian power before an international court?
A.
We have been documenting war crimes in Ukraine for nine years.
We were the first human rights group to send teams to Crimea, to Lugansk and its region.
For the first eight years our mission was to document arbitrary arrests, kidnappings, torture, sexual violence, and murders of civilians in the occupied territories, as well as politically motivated persecutions.
I personally interviewed hundreds of people who have survived Russian captivity and who told me horrible stories, how they were beaten up, tortured with electricity, how they were raped…
Q.
Did your job totally change after the February 2022 invasion?
A.
We are facing an unprecedented number of human rights violations.
We work throughout the country, including the occupied areas.
In 10 months of Russian aggression, we have documented 31,000 episodes of war crimes.
It is a huge number, but it is only the tip of the iceberg because Russia uses terror as a deliberate policy to break the resistance of the people through the immense suffering of the people of Ukraine.
We don't just document violations of the Geneva conventions, we document human suffering.
Q.
Is Russia using rape as a weapon of war?
R.
It is part of the terror that Russia imposes in the areas it occupies and it is clearly part of a military tactic.
That is why they also assassinated local politicians, priests, volunteers, artists, journalists, human rights defenders... Their message is clear: do not offer resistance because the same thing will happen to you as they did.
For them, rape is a particularly effective weapon because it is a crime that causes shame not only for the victim, but often for the entire community.
Victims of sexual violence feel ashamed: they, their neighbors, their families, who feel guilty for not having been able to avoid it.
And the whole community feels the same fear that they might find themselves in their place.
It is a crime that they use to break ties within the community.
"Vladimir Putin uses terror as a deliberate policy to break the resistance of the people."
P.
Anna Politkovskaya, the murdered Russian journalist, recounted in her books that they did the same in Chechnya
A.
In Chechnya, in Mali, in Libya... in many countries.
Q.
Do you think there is any way to prove that these are orders that come directly from Vladimir Putin?
A.
Yes. Russia has used war for decades to achieve geopolitical objectives on different continents.
And he's been committing these kinds of crimes for a long time.
Russian troops have committed atrocities in Chechnya, Moldova, Georgia, Syria, Mali, Libya... And they have never been punished.
They feel that they can do whatever they want.
When the civilized world looked at the images of the corpses lying in the streets of Bucha, it realized that they were civilians, that there was no military justification for these crimes.
The Russians killed them because they had done the same thing in Syria, in Georgia, in Chechnya, as Anna Politkovskaya recounted.
And they have gotten used to doing it.
Q.
How is all this documented?
How do you search for evidence that can be presented before an international court?
R.
In the early stages of the investigation we used different sources of information.
We live in a digital age and we can analyze open sources.
People with a mobile phone can record photos and videos that can become evidence.
And precisely because we work with Ukrainian networks we can immediately send people to the liberated regions so that they can collect testimonies from the victims on the ground.
When Russia attacks a civilian building, we can very quickly send people to film what happened and collect testimony.
And it is only a first phase of the investigation.
We work in coordination with the International Criminal Court, the UN, the OSCE…
Q.
How do you work to identify Russian units on the ground where war crimes were committed?
R.
It is a much more ambitious task because our objective is to identify the specific perpetrators, not only the Army unit, but the specific people who committed crimes.
And that is possible thanks also to digital instruments that we could not dream of 15 years ago.
We have satellite images, photos, recordings, videos taken by civilians.
But that is not enough: we need to collect solid evidence that can prove in court that those perpetrators, who have the right to a defense, have committed specific crimes.
And that means each of the crimes will require a major documentation effort.
Q.
What does terror mean within the Russian military strategy?
R.
It is something that I have asked myself a lot during these nine years.
Because?
What is the use of using so much cruelty?
When I started working with survivors of Russian captivity, I couldn't believe that human beings were capable of such things.
And I wanted to understand what was in the heads of the people capable of committing those crimes.
I started reading a lot of psychology articles trying to explain that behavior.
It's like an experiment in cruelty with other human beings.
I read that an experiment was once done in which a dog was given electric shocks every time it was given food.
And even when they stopped giving it to her, she no longer wanted to eat.
He would rather starve than experience pain.
I think they are doing something similar with the Ukrainian people.
They want to show suffering in an atrocious way, make it very visible,
Q.
Do you think that the international community has a real will to prosecute war crimes in Ukraine in the future, that it would be willing to take Putin before an international court?
Imagine that a withdrawal agreement happens because the impunity of the Russian president is guaranteed...
R.
I am not naïve, but I do believe that there is a global awareness for international justice to be more effective and work better, and that happens because it is independent of politics.
Justice must be independent of the magnitude of Putin's power.
If he has committed crimes against humanity, we have to prosecute them.
It is our obligation.
The perpetrators must be prosecuted and punished, not only for the Ukrainians, but to prevent such atrocities from being committed in other parts of the world.
It is true that Nazi criminals were only tried after the collapse of the regime.
But we are in a very different world.
Law and justice must be independent of political decisions.
This will make our world safer, more reliable, honest and fair.
We can not wait.
We have to establish an international court and hold Putin, Lukashenko and other Russian leaders to answer for their crimes.
Q.
Some experts maintain that Russia is committing genocide against the Ukrainian people.
Do you agree with them?
R.
It is a genocidal war.
I am a human rights lawyer and I know that genocide is the crime of crimes.
And it is very difficult to prove because you have to prove that there is a genocidal will behind the torture, the murders, the sexual violence, the forced deportations, the kidnappings of Ukrainian children.
For me it is a clear attempt to partially or totally destroy an ethnic group, the Ukrainians.
Putin, the people around him, the top officials of the Russian Federation say it out loud, they do not hide it.
For example, that the Ukrainian people do not exist, that the Ukrainian language does not exist, nor does the culture, nor the Ukrainian state, that they are Russians.
That is why Russia acts in these ways in the occupied territories: it persecutes the Ukrainian identity and prohibits the Ukrainian language.
It is something that they begin to teach immediately in the schools of the areas they occupy.
They even destroy books on Ukrainian history.
It is something that happens in other parts of the world: it is not necessary to liquidate a group to end their culture.
You change their identity and that ethnic group will disappear.
Q.
How did you feel when the war started and you suddenly found yourself in a war zone, that your life and that of your family were in danger?
A.
It is very difficult to learn to live in a country where there is no safe place.
A family I know fled to another city further from the front because they were afraid for their daughter.
But they were still hit by a Russian missile and the four-year-old girl, Lisa, died because there is no longer a safe place in the Ukraine.
The Russians deliberately target civilian buildings, homes, churches, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure.
Its goal is to leave millions of people without light, water, electricity, or internet during the winter.
Daily life has been ruined after the invasion.
We live in constant danger and can only plan day by day because we don't know what will happen to us in the next hour.
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