Nobel Peace Prize Winner Oleksandra Matviichuk

"You have to defend the law with weapons"

Oleksandra Matviichuk. Dan Bayer/Aspen Security Forum

Oleksandra Matviichuk is a Ukrainian human rights lawyer and co-recipient of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. She is a human rights lawyer by training who leads the Center for Civil Liberties, a Ukrainian human rights organization.

I caught up with Oleksandra Matviichuk at the Aspen Security Forum, a major international security conference. She spoke on a panel about Ukraine, and at one point challenged National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on the (in her view, painfully slow) provision of F16 fighter jets and advanced weaponry to Ukraine. In our conversation she defended the decision to provide cluster munitions to the Ukrainian military, and again stressed the need for more modern weaponry to defend and liberate Ukraine.

It is somewhat peculiar to see a Nobel Peace Laureate argue so forcefully in favor of providing an army with the weapons it needs to win a war, so I asked her directly how she reconciles her faith in human rights law with the desperate need for weapons to defend her country from Russian occupation?

Mark Leon Goldberg You are a human rights lawyer. Your weapon is the law. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine itself is an illegal act of aggression. The conduct of the war is through mass atrocities and the deliberate targeting of civilians. As a human rights lawyer, has this revealed to you the limits of the law? And how do you reconcile what I presume to be a faith in international law with the reality of what’s happening right now? 

Oleksandra Matviichuk As a human rights lawyer, I have an obligation to document each human rights violation, regardless of the site. And we do it. And that is why I can clearly assume that the vast majority of war crimes in our database were committed by Russian forces. And when the large-scale invasion started, I found myself in a very weird position. People would ask me: “How we can help?”  And if these people represented some political forces in other countries, members of parliaments or members of governments or other officials, I had to answer: “If you want to help us, please provide Ukraine with weapons.”  And this is something which I couldn’t even imagine! I understood that when the law doesn’t work (and I still do believe that it’s temporary, that we will manage to fix it) you have to defend the law with weapons also. 

Mark Leon Goldberg Well, on that point, there is this debate about the use of cluster bombs and the provision of cluster bombs by the United States to the Ukrainian forces to defend their territory. Cluster bombs are not illegal. There’s no international ban on cluster bombs, but they are highly stigmatized for the fact that a certain percentage of them necessarily will not blow up and they remain unexploded ordinance and are inherently therefore indiscriminate, and can kill long after the war is over. How do you approach that kind of  tricky moral question of the provision of cluster munitions? 

Oleksandra Matviichuk We are in a counter-offensive and we need weapons to release people who live in occupied territories.  Occupation is not just changing one state flag for another. Occupation is mass graves, torture chambers, filtration camps, massive deportation, denial of identity and other horrible things. But we all know that cluster munitions are a huge harm to civilians. And Ukraine is already one of the most mined countries in the world. So for sure, I’m a little bit worried. Ukrainian authorities said that they will use these cluster munitions only far from densely populated areas, but it will be a problem. What I want from our partners is to provide us weapons which we ask them to provide, like [the long range ballistic missile system] ATACMS like fighter jets, F-16s, like weapons which are very modernized, which can reach their long distance target and without harm to civilians — because it’s a modern weapon. So for a year we asked for it…and we received it only in February this year. Now we are in this conversation about F16s, and still it’s not understandable! The process of teaching our pilots will start this year? Next year? The year after next year? We are very grateful for all support which we received. But the truth is when you receive modern weaponry, you will provide less harm to civilians. 

You can listen to our entire conversation on your preferred podcast listening app.

We discuss in detail her background as a human rights lawyer and her work documenting Russian war crimes in Ukraine. It was a powerful conversation.

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Transcript edited for clarity

Mark Leon Goldberg I’m interested in having you describe the nature of your work prior to Russia's full scale invasion last February. 

Oleksandra Matviichuk I'm a human rights lawyer and head of the Center for Civil Liberties. It's human rights organization, which we established in 2007 in Kiev, and we are promoting human rights and defending human dignity for all these years. We try to always to be very flexible to the challenges which we face. For example, when Revolution of Dignity started, I, together with my team, created a civil initiative  "Maidan SOS," and we brought up several thousands of people to provide legal and other assistance to persecuted protesters. 

Mark Leon Goldberg Just to set the context. Thousands of protesters were on the streets. Many of them were beaten and arbitrarily detained. And you provided legal services to support them?  

Oleksandra Matviichuk It was a period when millions of people stood up their voice against the corrupt and authoritarian Yanukovich government and the government started to persecute peaceful protesters around the country. And that is why we would work 24 hours a day and hundreds and hundreds of people pass through our work here, people who were beaten, arrested, tortured, kidnaped, accused in fabricated criminal administrative charges. And then more than 100 unarmed protesters were gunned down in the center of the Kiev. So we pay a rather high price just for a chance to build a country where the rights of everybody are protected. 

Mark Leon Goldberg But then, after the annexation of Crimea and Russia's invasion of the eastern parts of the country, your work changed. 

Oleksandra Matviichuk Yes, it was changed even before annexation of Crimea, because this was a process. We sent the first mobile group to Crimea and then to Luhansk and Donesk regions in February 2014. And I remember that for that moment we really didn't understand that the war started. Some "Green men" identifed as soldiers appeared. Russia said "It's not our soldiers" and it was a total mess. Now it's very predictable that when Ukraine obtained a chance for democratic transition in order to stop us on this way, Russia invaded Ukraine. But I remember our feeling -- it was so shocking that we can't believe. 

Mark Leon Goldberg And what sort of criminal evidence did you seek to collect while you were trying to investigate whatever is happening in terms of violations of human rights law in Russian occupied parts of Ukraine? 

Oleksandra Matviichuk Back then was the first several years of the war we concentrated on the illegal practice of abduction, torture, sexual violence and killing civilians on the occupied territories, as well as political motivated criminal prosecutions. And I personally interviewed hundreds of people who survived the Russian captivity, and they told me how they were beaten, how they were raped, how they were smashed into wooden boxes, how their fingers were cut [off], how they were tortured with electricity and other horrible details of torture. And we sent numerous reports to U.N. to Council of Europe to see to European Union. But nothing changed. Nobody was interested, really. And I became frustrated because I know that in that moment when I interviewed the next survivors, the same horror is going on in different illegal places of detention, which Russia created in the occupied territories. Why Russians did it? Because when you occupy the territory, you have to control over this territories. And that is why Russians imposed terror against civilians. They deliberately persecute and exterminate active local people: mayors, journalists, priests, human rights defenders, any people who have some reputation among the local community. 

Mark Leon Goldberg So you're documenting these numerous violations of international humanitarian law, of human rights law. No one is doing anything about it. And then, of course, last February as the full scale invasion of Ukraine. How did your work change after February 2022.

Oleksandra Matviichuk Ever since, which were called normal life was really until one moment. Like the possibility to go to work, to hug your friends, to have family dinners disappears in one moment. From a professional point of view, we faced with enormous amount of war crimes, because Russia uses war crimes as a method of warfare. Russia instrumentalized the pain. Russian troops deliberately cause enormous suffering to Ukrainian civilians in order to break our resistance and occupy the country. And I always emphasize that we document not just violations of Geneva and conventions, we document human pain. 

Mark Leon Goldberg What's an example that would be concrete and understandable for people to really learn the nature of the method of war that Russia is using? 

Oleksandra Matviichuk Let me tell you one story. We have now in our database more than 45,000 such stories. But I would like to tell you a story of 14 year old Sophia from Mariupol. And she, together with her mother, younger sister and small brother, were hiding in a basement in Mariupol last year. And one day the family was bombarded by Russian aircrafts. And I want to quote here. (Ed note: Matviichuk at this point picks up her phone to read a WhatsApp message) "I went to dig out my mother. I tried to do it with my hands because there were no shovels nearby. Some aircrafts were flying around me. I was also scared at that moment and I wanted to help my mum. I dug her up so she could breathe and then I went to ask for help. Brother died immediately. Mother died after several hours when she was taken out from the rubbles.".But this is not the end of the story. Because when the Russians killed or arrested parents, they started to deport their children to Russia. We see forcible adoption in Russian families and they don't care that these children have relatives and also members of families in Ukraine. And [Sophia's] elder sister who live in Dnipro started to try to find your sisters and she revealed that they are in occupied Donetsk and she came to Donetsk to get them back. And it was very courageous action because this young woman was 19 years old. And I know like as a human rights lawyer who work with torture cases and sexual violence, how dangerous it was for her was to go to Russia to occupy Donetsk. But she came in time because just before she arrived, the Russian family came to get acquainted with their new children and she stopped this process of forcible adoption. 

Mark Leon Goldberg So you've documented all of these crimes that are happening in pretty excruciating detail, as you've just said. This time, presumably, people are wanting to do something about the evidence that you've uncovered. What avenues currently exist and what avenues do you wish existed for justice for war crimes prosecutions? 

Oleksandra Matviichuk We face with an accountability gap, which has two dimensions. The first problem is that there is no international court who can prosecute the political leadership and high military command of the Russian state for the crime of aggression and all these atrocities which we now documented. It's just a result of their leadership's decision to start this war. Even the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction in the Russian war against Ukraine. So we must establish special tribunal on aggression to hold Putin, Lukashenko and their surrounding accountable. But there is also a second dimension of accountability. The war turned people into  numbers because the scale of war crimes grow so large that it's become impossible to recognize all the stories. But people are not numbers. This means that we have to demonstrate justice to return people there are names. And we have to find a way to provide a chance for justice for hundreds of thousands of victims of this war, regardless who they are, what their social position, what types of crimes they endured, and whether or not media or international organizations are interested in their cases. In this regard, we need international assistance. We have to ingrain international element into the level of national investigation and national justice, like a model where national judges work together with international judges, national investigators work together with international investigators. 

Mark Leon Goldberg And these exist, like the Special Court for Sierra Leone and other similar courts that are this hybrid idea. But you're advocating to really instrumentalize that, to make that happen in Ukraine. 

Oleksandra Matviichuk We advocate it to change the global approach, to work around justice, because when you speak with top officials of different countries, you understand that they see like sad but normal, that when you have multiple human rights violations, like during the war, it's sad, but it's normal that a lot of people will have no justice. Because it was like this before. But we live in 21st century now. We have so much digital instruments which can help us to investigate what's happened, to restore the situation, to collect evidence, to identify perpetrators. So it's technically possible we have just to develop our legal infrastructure like we developed our technologies just to do it. 

Mark Leon Goldberg There's this line from your Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech I find so particularly poignant. "We still see the world through the lens of the Nuremberg Tribunal, where war criminals were convicted only after the fall of the Nazi regime. But justice should not depend on the resilience of authoritarian regimes." How do we get there? 

Oleksandra Matviichuk We have to express bravery and historical responsibility because it's not just Ukrainian problem that nothing works. And Russia can started this war of aggression. Occupied part of Ukrainian territory, extended this war to the large scale invasion, committed horrible atrocities and the whole UN system can't stop this. If you will not be able to fix international order, we can find ourselves in a world where countries with a strong military potential, a nuclear weapon will dictate the rules of the game to entire international community and even the force of the changed internationally recognized borders. And such kind of world will be dangerous for anyone without exceptions. And that's why we must demonstrate justice. We must change our way of thinking. 

Mark Leon Goldberg You are a human rights lawyer. Your weapon is the law. Russia's invasion of Ukraine itself is an illegal act of aggression. The conduct of the war is through mass atrocities and deliberate targeting of civilians. As a human rights lawyer, has this revealed it to you the limits of the law? And how do reconcile what I presume to be a faith in international law with the reality of what's happening right now? 

Oleksandra Matviichuk As a human rights lawyer, I have an obligation to document each human rights violation, regardless of the site. And we do it. And that is why I can clearly assume that the vast majority of war crimes in our database were committed by Russian forces. And when the large scale invasion started, I found myself in very weird position. People would ask me: "how we can help?"  And if this people represented some political forces in other countries, members of parliaments or members of governments or other officials, I had to answer: "If you want to help us please provides Ukraine with weapons."  And this is something which I couldn't even imagine. I understood that when the law doesn't work (and I still do believe that it's temporary, that we will manage to fix it) you have to defend the law with weapons also. 

Mark Leon Goldberg Well, on that point, there is this debate about the use of cluster bombs and the provision of cluster bombs by the United States to the Ukrainian forces to defend their territory. Cluster bombs are not illegal. There's no international ban on cluster bombs, but they are highly stigmatized for the fact that a certain percentage of them necessarily will not blow up and they remain unexploded ordinance and are inherently therefore indiscriminate and can kill long after the war is over. How do you approach that kind of  tricky moral question of the provision of cluster munitions? 

Oleksandra Matviichuk We are in a counter-offensive and we need weapons to release people who live in occupied territories.  Occupation is not just changing one state flag for another. Occupation is mass graves, tortute chambers, filtration camps, massive deportation, denial of identity and other horrible things. But we all know that cluster munitions is a huge harm to civilians. And Ukraine is already one of the most mined countries in the world. So for sure, I'm a little bit worried. Ukrainian authorities told that they will use this cluster munitions only far from densely populated areas, but it will be a problem. What I want from our partners, I want from them to provide us weapons which we ask them to provide, like ATACAMS like fighter jets, F-16s, like weapons, which is very modernized, which can reach their long distance target and without harm to civilians because it's a modern weapon. So for a year we asked for it, more than ten, and we received it only in February this year. Now are in this conversation about F16s, and still it's not understandable! The process of teaching our pilots will start this year? Next year? The year after next year? We are very grateful for all support which we received. But it's the truth is when you receive a modern weaponry, you will provide less harm to civilians. 

Mark Leon Goldberg So on the panel just now, you said something I think provocative, something I hadn't thought of, that we should not just envision a Ukrainian victory, but what would a Russian defeat look like? What does that look like to you? 

Oleksandra Matviichuk Maybe I will start with a story that we are very interconnected with our Russians, human rights colleagues, and they helped us a lot during this war. They have never not responded to my requests for help. We speak about the hostages, which are in Russian prisons or some other things. And when I ask them how I can be useful for them, especially now when they are faced with enormous repressions from the Russian states, they always answer, "If you want to help us please be successful, because success of Ukraine will provide a chance for democratic future of Russia itself." And, I wished Russia to be democratic and prosperous  country. It will be much more like, safe, for Ukraine and for the world itself. But in order to reach this point, we have to win. And Russia has to lose. Russia needs military defeat because it's not just Putin's war. It's a war of Russian nation. Putin govern the country not just with repressions and censorship, but with a special social contract which is based on Russian glory. And the majority of Russians, unfortunately, still see their glory in the forcible restoration of Russian empire. 

Mark Leon Goldberg Lastly, is there anything else you wanted to add or point you wanted to emphasize for kind of foreign policy community that listens to this? 

Oleksandra Matviichuk I always tell that when large scale invasion started, the democratic countries said "Let's help Ukraine not to fail." But it's time to change this narrative to another one: "Let's help Ukraine to win fast" because it's a huge difference between this two narratives, Let's help Ukraine not to fail and let's help Ukraine to win fast. We are bleeding, we have no time. Time for us me converted in numerous deaths in battlefield in occupied territories in the Premier. 

Mark Leon Goldberg Thank you so much for your time and for your work. 

Oleksandra Matviichuk Thanks.