Kyiv, Ukraine – Years earlier than Russia’s full-scale conflict in Ukraine started in 2022, Oleksandra Matviichuk and her Heart for Civil Liberties, a Kyiv-based human rights group, have been already documenting the experiences of Ukrainians captured by Russian troopers, intelligence operatives and pro-Moscow separatists.
“I personally interviewed a whole bunch and a whole bunch of people that survived Russian captivity,” she informed Al Jazeera in her workplace in central Kyiv.
The survivors informed her and her colleagues how they’d been crushed, raped and electrocuted. Some had their fingers lower off and nails torn away or drilled in makeshift prisons and focus camps often called “basements”.
Dozens extra have been allegedly executed arbitrarily, discovered useless with proof of torture on their our bodies or are nonetheless reported as lacking.
Based on Matviichuk, these circumstances have been a part of the Kremlin’s technique to get rid of pro-Ukrainian activists and horrify everybody else into submission in every village, city or metropolis Russia seized.
“When Russians occupy a metropolis, they begin to intentionally exterminate lively individuals, journalists, monks, artists, academics, mayors, human rights defenders,” she stated.
The Heart for Civil Liberties received the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize collectively with the Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski and Russian organisation Memorial.
‘We’re not historians. We’re attorneys’
When the conflict started greater than two years in the past, Matviichuk’s identify was discovered on lists of targets that Russian troopers carried with them, her staffers and Ukrainian intelligence stated.
Even with all her firsthand data, Matviichuk was nonetheless shocked by what occurred in 2022 in Russia-occupied Ukrainian cities.
In considered one of them, Bucha exterior Kyiv, Russian servicemen shot useless a whole bunch of civilians, in response to witnesses.
“Russians killed them solely as a result of they may,” Matviichuk stated.
To her, the killings signified a brand new degree of violence – mindless, only for the sake of it, with whole impunity and tacit approval from the Kremlin.
But, she doesn’t imagine in “symmetrical” measures similar to extrajudicial killings of Russian conflict criminals.
As of June, a whole bunch of the centre’s volunteers and staffers had documented 72,000 alleged conflict crimes Russian servicemen dedicated in Ukraine – however their final purpose goes far past the data.
“We’re not historians. We’re attorneys,” Matviichuk stated.
She needs to ascertain a tribunal for Russian President Vladimir Putin, a world mechanism to carry to justice each cog in Russia’s conflict machine – servicemen and army, civilian and spiritual leaders and tv personalities who cosy as much as the Kremlin.
“There’s a substantial motion for a conflict crimes tribunal right now, and Matviichuk has been central within the work to carry the required assist for this concept,” Ivar Dale, a senior coverage adviser with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, a rights watchdog, informed Al Jazeera.
“She manages to mix grassroots activism with high-level worldwide advocacy,” he stated.
Recalling considered one of Matviichuk’s speeches she witnessed in Berlin, Alisa Ganieva, a dissident Russian writer who emigrated after 2022, had nothing however excessive reward.
“Oleksandra can mesmerise with the sound of her voice, with a thought. She will be able to hit with a rhetoric trick, a logical argument, can encourage empathy and make the European public wish to assist [Ukraine] by means of motion,” she informed Al Jazeera.
In the meantime, Matviichuk’s colleagues share her dedication and pay little thought to the Nobel Peace Prize the group acquired in 2022.
“Overseas, they’re like, ‘Oh, you received the Nobel Prize.’ However right here, everybody’s targeted on the conflict,” stated Alona Maksimenko, 26, the workplace coordinator who was the primary to obtain the decision from the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
The Nobel, nevertheless, helps entice extra funds and staffers – even when some should cross an ocean to affix.
One in every of them is Anna Nazaryk, an Argentinian with Ukrainian roots who gave up a well-paying company job in Buenos Aires.
Her grandfather was a Ukrainian nationalist who fought in World Warfare II in opposition to the Soviets and selected to give up to British forces in 1945.
His brothers-in-arms succumbed to the guarantees of Soviet officers and have been gunned down “half an hour” after laying down their arms, Nazaryk stated.
Nowadays, she manages the centre’s worldwide advocacy efforts and is bettering her Ukrainian.
“I wished the job. I acquired the job,” she informed Al Jazeera.
The making of a human rights activist
Matviichuk selected a profession in human rights when she met a Soviet-era Ukrainian dissident whereas in highschool.
At the moment, artists, rights activists and nationalists who wished to interrupt freed from Russia’s management fought for Ukraine’s independence. Many have been arrested, jailed and forcibly dedicated to psychiatric establishments – however didn’t hand over.
“They have been very modest, very trustworthy individuals who say what they assume and do what they are saying,” Matviichuk stated.
She graduated from a prestigious legislation college in Kyiv, studied human rights and earned a doctorate. Later, she labored in a financial institution to complement the centre she based in 2007.
It started documenting rights abuses in Ukraine, neighbouring Belarus and Russia, together with protests in opposition to Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 that ended with a whole bunch of convictions.
It was additionally in 2007 that Matviichuk acquired the primary of her prizes, an award named after considered one of her teenage idols, Vasyl Stus, a Ukrainian poet and dissident who died in jail in 1985.
Matviichuk stop her financial institution job to dedicate herself to the centre full time after Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Kremlin determine from japanese Ukraine’s Donbas area, was elected president in 2010.
An ex-convict and populist, Yanukovych tried to steer Ukraine away from its pro-West course.
Rallies in opposition to his insurance policies known as the Euromaidan protests started in November 2013 on Kyiv’s Independence Sq..
As Matviichuk was holding coaching for rights activists from throughout Ukraine close by, police have been beating up protesters.
She and her trainees determined to type the SOS–Euromaidan group, which helped the protesters who have been arrested, crushed, tear-gassed, detained and tortured by pro-Yanukovych police and supporters.
The group’s members confronted threats. Some acquired ominous invites to prosecutor’s workplaces. Others have been greeted by armed hoodlums close to their houses.
‘By no means been so scared in my whole life’
In late February 2014, calls flooded the group’s hotline as protesters clashed with police. Dozens have been shot by snipers who activists and Ukraine’s subsequent interim authorities stated have been deployed by Yanukovych’s administration.
Through the chaos, Matviichuk’s husband, Oleksandr, known as her to say goodbye as he was within the centre of the violence.
Matviichuk stated she had by no means been so scared in her life.
Fortunately, he was not harm.
Yanukovych fled to Russia, and withing days, she despatched the primary group of observers to Crimea as Moscow was readying to annex the peninsula.
The West responded to the annexation with diatribes and sanctions – however saved shopping for Russian gas.
Matviichuk nonetheless blames the West for the inaction that made the Kremlin imagine that “they’ll do no matter they need,” she stated.
Crimea’s annexation and Moscow’s backing of pro-Russian separatists within the Donbas triggered a brand new flood of rights violations, together with the arrest of Crimean filmmaker Oleh Sentsov.
A Russian courtroom sentenced him in 2015 to twenty years in jail for “terrorism”. Matviichuk campaigned for his launch till he was freed in 2019.
