Ukraine is at the forefront of envisioning justice in a changing world. In conversation with Kharkiv-born and Australia-based writer Maria Tumarkin, Oleksandra Matviichuk acknowledges the immense individual toll of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine. And yet, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate sees possibilities for bringing war criminals to justice before the war ends, renewing the rule of law, and creating a future where justice can exist — if individuals do their part.
Maria Tumarkin: My first question was actually around how you visualise the idea of justice. The typical representation is either scales that are in some sort of balance or Lady Justice, who is often blindfolded — with the idea that justice is objective. And a lot of decolonial scholars have criticised both the idea of balance and the idea of blind justice.
When you picture justice, what do you picture? How do you visualise it?
Oleksandra Matviichuk: I’ve been working with people who have suffered harm in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine for ten years now. And I know that justice means very different things to different people. For someone, justice means seeing the criminals behind bars. For someone it is a matter of obtaining compensation. Otherwise they will be left with the feeling that justice has not been served. For someone, justice is learning the truth about what happened to their loved ones. And for someone else, justice involves the opportunity to be heard, and official recognition that what happened to them, or to their family, is not only amoral, but it is against the law.
And so when I visualise these different needs people present, it occurs to me that justice in this war is a matter of strategy — a complex strategy involving various practices and institutions targeting the different aspects of this multidimensional phenomenon.
MT: You’ve described these incredibly different and divergent conceptions of justice that might be seen as competing or in a state of tension or friction with each other, and certainly unattainable for everyone at the same time. We know that even in the best-case scenario, the national and transnational mechanisms of justice seeking cannot actually satisfy the diversity of needs you have described. And so, whatever those mechanisms are, we know that even in the utopian scenario they are going to be insufficient.
What do you see as the role of civil society, not of the official mechanisms, transnational or national, but of civil society, both inside Ukraine and in the diaspora, in honouring these very different needs people have in relation to justice?
OM: One thing we have to do is end this stereotypical approach to justice, where the latter is considered unattainable as long as we are in the midst of war and massive human rights crises. The world has changed dramatically, yet we are still looking at it from the perspective of the Nuremberg trials. It used to be normal, if sad, to think that as long as a country is at war, or suffering mass persecution under an authoritarian regime, then the people who are victims — because there are so many of them — have no chance for justice, since it is so difficult to document every individual story.
But I’m challenging this norm, because, in theory, humanity now has this capability.
We already have new technologies, which allow us to recreate events in detail, collect evidence, communicate with people living under occupation, and identify criminals. Thirty years ago, during the Yugoslav wars, these technologies were beyond our wildest dreams. Organisations like Bellingcat make a convincing case that it is not always necessary to be on the scene to understand what happened. Theoretically, it is already possible to have a record of the individual story of each person involved in mass violations. So the first thing we need is to overcome our own mental barriers and set ourselves an ambitious goal. Because, unfortunately, the legal framework for human rights is not evolving as fast as technology is.
Another reason we ought to make the effort to refute this ‘norm’ is because justice is a precondition for sustainable peace. If the demand for justice is not met, it may very well transform into a demand for revenge. And this perpetuates the cycle of violence.
We are observing flare-ups of unresolved armed conflicts that for decades had seemed to be frozen. We have to change the global approach to war crimes justice and set an ambitious goal — to ensure justice for every person who has been a victim of war crimes. Regardless of who that person is or what their social status is, what kind of violence they endured, or whether the media or international organisations are following their story.
Ukraine can set a precedent. And all our achievements can be reproduced in other parts of the world.
MT: You talked about challenging ideas of what justice looks like and the ability to provide justice for every person who has been wronged on a global scale, offering Ukraine as an example to the world, which to me is really a remarkable thought. I want to connect it to something I’ve been wanting to ask you.
Often when you speak to international audiences, you talk about the international architecture of law created after the Second World War being broken. But then you add ‘temporarily’. Are you being diplomatic? Are you trying not to be too radical? Or do you believe that this brokenness is temporary, where there are so many institutions — from the United Nations to Amnesty International, to the Red Cross, to the International Atomic Energy Agency — that have failed Ukraine and continue to do so?
OM: I don’t know what the future will bring, nor does anybody else. But the future is not just uncertain, it hasn’t been written yet. All my efforts — along with those of my team and other human rights defenders in Ukraine and around the world — are aimed at restoring the power of the law.
Because law is a more just, more inclusive, more predictable, and safer means of regulating relationships within society than brute force. That said, this is certainly not the first time humanity is in a situation where the law is not working. During the Second World War, entire countries were ruined and occupied, millions of people were killed or went missing; there was a network of Nazi concentration camps, where people were simply exterminated. Back then I am sure it seemed like the law was not working and the only thing that mattered was brute force. Things are different now.
I think that instead of trying to guess the future we should put all our efforts into restoring the power of the law and attaining the future we want.
MT: In this space — where you said we don’t know what the future is and we need to believe that the future can bring us the restoration of that system to like it was in the aftermath of the Second World War — what gives you hope in that space, in the work that you are doing?
I see you speaking every day and really doing this work that might sometimes feel utterly despair-inducing. And I think, maybe, of your brand of hope as something that philosopher Raimond Gaita, amongst others, described as ‘hope without optimism’, where you may be profoundly pessimistic about institutions, or the current balance of power, or the decision-makers, etc., but nonetheless, you act out of a place of hope because you love justice, and because you believe in it. That may be just my reading of your brand of hope. Is there hope that powers your work? And what kind of hope is it, particularly in relation to international partners, in relation to what’s happening now?
OM: I take an optimistic view of the future, although I don’t think it will be easy. And I understand that while we have a chance of succeeding, there is no guarantee. This means we have to do everything in our power to make the most of the chance we have.
Václav Havel’s vision of hope really resonates with me: hope is not a conviction that everything will turn out fine, but the certainty that everything you do has meaning. Living and working through full-scale war is pretty difficult. Even if you just look at the emotional toll. But we do have a source of support. We are standing on the shoulders of our predecessors. Our history includes the experience of Ukrainian dissidents, who fought the entire Soviet totalitarian machine with nothing but their words and their positions; and they had the courage to use them as instruments. And although the dissidents were put behind bars and into psychiatric hospitals, although some were killed and others crippled, it turns out that in the end it wasn’t so little. The Soviet totalitarian monster crumbled.
MT: How do you think about justice in relation to the occupied territories, both in relation to the territories that have been liberated and the territories that are still occupied? Do they require a different kind of thinking about what justice might look like and might entail?
OM: We don’t know where we are in this war — near the end, in the middle, or only at the beginning. And no matter when the people currently living under occupation will be freed, one thing we have to do right now is create a vision for how justice will be reinforced in the de-occupied territories — and communicate that vision.
I interviewed a person who had been taken prisoner in Donetsk, it wasn’t even for opposing the occupying authorities. The occupied territories are a ‘grey zone’, where most people have no way to protect themselves. This person was held in the basement and tortured because [the occupying authorities] wanted to expropriate their small business. And this person told me about an acquaintance, who is still working at a gas station that the Russians took over when they occupied the territory. Well, this acquaintance is convinced that when [Ukrainian] state sovereignty is restored he will be punished.
We need to be allaying these fears already. We should communicate clearly about red lines. People who have remained in the occupied territories are not guilty, and nobody is going to persecute them for choosing to stay, or for the things they were forced to do as formalities in order to survive. For instance, accepting Russian citizenship while under occupation. Parents can be denied custody of their children if they do not have Russian citizenship. Medical care in the occupied territories is provided only to those with Russian citizenship. This is just one example of what people must do simply to survive.
But there are red lines. If a person commits war crimes, they will be punished. And these crimes are not subject to any statute of limitations.
MT: I have a friend who survived Srebrenica, and he’s been taking students back there for many years. He’s an anthropologist. And he told me about many conversations that he’s had, particularly with mothers of men who were killed in Srebrenica by the Serbs. He would talk to them about the Hague, or about international institutions and mechanisms of justice. And to them, that meant very little, because they haven’t had the bodies to bury. Are there things, do you think, that need to be attended to first, before we can get to questions of justice? Is there a way in which the need for grief and the need for justice might butt heads in some way, or might be at cross purposes sometimes?
OM: This example really resonates with me, as I’ve been working with the families of missing persons since 2014. And when I say that justice is the chance to know the truth about what happened to your loved ones, I’m speaking from this experience.
In 2014, when people first started to go missing in this war, their mothers and wives did incredible things — far beyond human capacities — just to learn the truth about what happened to their sons or husbands and to find their loved ones or their bodies. The Centre for Civil Liberties published their first report on this issue, describing the problem and the pain that families were left to navigate on their own, for neither our legislation nor our practices were equipped to handle it. We called this report ‘For the Sake of One Name’. And it contains the breathtaking stories of women and men — and what they did to bring back a name from oblivion. Let me stress once again that justice is a multifaceted concept that cannot be reduced to the image of a prison cell. It is, among other things, being able to know where your son’s grave is.
MT: You talked about people’s need to know and there’s a book that comes to mind — A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers by Lawrence Weschler. It is about the aftermath of military dictatorships and totalitarianism in Brazil and Uruguay. There is a moment in the book that has stayed with me for many years. Weschler interviews a lot of people about the idea of justice. And then he says, and I quote now, ‘‘if anything the desire for truth is often more urgently felt […] than the desire for justice’. Then he goes on to talk about the profound, almost spiritual, human need and the human right of acknowledgement. What does it look like in your mind?
And I guess maybe I’m circling back to that question about what can a civic society do? This idea of acknowledgement, the burden for it has to be carried by various parts of civic society. Do you have a vision for it, for the work of acknowledgement that will need to be happening for decades to come and will need to happen intergenerationally as well?
OM: One of the key words in this quote is the word ‘truth’. And truth is always the first casualty of war. Warfare has a military dimension, but it also involves economics, cyber activity, trade, values, and information. The latter dimension is where truth is killed, alternative reality is promoted, and lies are called ‘alternative facts’ in order to influence how people view the war and the situation around it. And this distorted view of the situation results in groundless actions and decisions.
In the eight years before Russia launched its full-scale invasion, it was trying to hide the war crimes being committed in the occupied territories. I remember how the Centre for Civil Liberties sent dozens of reports about the systematic practice of kidnapping, rape, and torture in the occupied territories to the UN, the OSCE, the Council of Europe, and even to the European Union. We sought to alert various governments to our findings, but nobody was interested in listening. And so we still have people who think — in categories that belong to a distorted version of reality — that occupation may be bad, but it is still better than war, because it reduces human suffering. But the truth is that occupation is a continuation of war, only in a different form. Occupation does not reduce human suffering, it just makes this suffering invisible. And so documentation matters — not only for achieving justice, but also for maintaining a record of reality as it actually is and preserving the truth for future generations. This is particularly important when it comes to Russia, which has invested billions in expanding its information operations infrastructure throughout the world. And this media machine is completely integrated into the Russian Federation’s military-industrial complex, which has strictly military aims.
I think this is the most documented war in human history. Since the very first days of the full-scale invasion we’ve been recording what has happened. Many people remember seeing the photos and videos from Bucha, where the bodies of civilians lying in the street remained there until those territories were liberated. We found the bodies of men and women in their own yards, in mass graves with their hands tied behind their backs, and in civilian cars, where entire families were shot while trying to evacuate their children from this dangerous zone. Russia immediately started saying that the photos were faked, or staged, that the bodies weren’t real, that they were actors lying in the street.
The communicative memory of lived experience lasts only three generations. All that remains after that is whatever meanings we have brought to light, thought through, and recorded. So now we are maintaining the grounds for a new ‘never again’ — evidence, testimonies, documents, everything that we need to prevent anyone from saying ‘we can do it again’ in the future.
MT: Because some of that documentation relies on testimonies of people, how have you found people’s (and I understand there would be a whole breadth of experience) attitudes to testifying, to having their stories recorded, archived, and become part of bigger projects?
OM: It depends on the people. Some people don’t want to say anything at all. It also depends on the kind of crime. People who have survived sexual violence are far less willing to talk about their experience.
But it also depends on the extent to which we, as an international community, are taking visible, decisive steps toward bolstering justice today, so that people start to believe in it again.
I work with people who have lived through hell. And I know that these people need to restore more than just their ruined lives, ruined families, and ruined idea of the future. They need to restore their belief that justice is possible, even if it is postponed.
I hit up against this in the first years of the war, when I was interviewing people who were victims of war crimes in the occupied territories. At the time we were focused on the practices of illegal kidnapping, torture, rape, and killing of civilians. I interviewed over a hundred men and women who survived Russian captivity. They told me about being beaten, raped, having their fingers cut off and bones crushed, about electric shocks to their genitalia. In the interviews we also asked whether they had gone to any state authorities or international organisations.
Some of them said no, they had not and did not intend to. How could the Ukrainian authorities or international organisations punish the people who had tortured them? Those people are in the territories occupied and protected by Russia. And then I would say, ‘But you came to me.’ And in that moment it began to dawn on these people (and me) that, despite their lack of faith, they still wanted their story to be heard and recorded.
And this is an enormous responsibility to bear. You are carrying these thousands of stories that people have told you and your colleagues, which they did not entrust to law enforcement or international organisations. These people have placed their trust and hope in you. And you are obligated.
MT: Thank you. If there is some kind of settlement that ends this war, do you see a way to stop people, to some extent, from feeling bitterly disillusioned about all the sacrifices that they have made, all the losses that they have endured, everything that they’ve lived through — if, politically, the end will be a compromise of some kind, not a major compromise, but a compromise nonetheless? Does it weigh heavily on your mind? As you said, we don’t know where we are in the war. We don’t know how much longer, etc. But I wonder if it’s on your mind to some extent.
OM: I have always said that the person who has suffered harm from the war should be at the heart of every strategy. But in this case I am not only talking about the people in Ukraine who have suffered from Russian aggression. Everything that we are going through right now is the result of the absolute impunity Russia has enjoyed for decades. Russia has committed these same crimes in Chechnya, Moldova, Georgia, Mali, Libya, Syria, and other countries around the world. Last year the Russian Human Rights Defence Centre Memorial released a report: comparing the Russian army’s tactics in Chechnya, Syria, and Ukraine, they concluded that this is all from the same war crime playbook. Russia has never been punished for these crimes. Russia is certain that it can do whatever it wants. So our fight is not only about justice for ourselves. We are fighting to prevent another Russian attack on yet another country or nation.
MT: Do you feel that the incredible pain and rage and anger that so many people feel can push justice, or ideas of justice, towards the ideas of revenge?
OM: There is an interesting book by psychiatrist Judith Herman about truth and repair. This book is about how justice can help people with trauma to heal. The author sees the legal mechanisms of justice as an important part of the process of overcoming trauma and getting on the path to post-traumatic development.
This shows me yet again how important our work is. Today millions of people in Ukraine are suffering. Even if you have not experienced these crimes yourself, just being close by and seeing what is happening is very traumatic.
Recently, the Russians targeted a children’s hospital — Okhmatdyt, which treats children with cancer — in a missile strike on Kyiv. That day, just a few hours after it happened, I had to take a taxi. As soon as I got in the car, the driver said, ‘If you need water or tissues, just ask.’ He explained that his passengers kept crying after what had happened, so he bought some water and tissues.
But living through the experience of war does not mean that we have to get stuck in it. One of our jobs is not to get stuck in the position of the victim, but to keep going. It’s true, we did not choose this experience. This war is not the result of our will; it is the result of Russia’s decision. But we have to keep moving. And in order to empower the people burned by war to overcome their trauma, we have to demonstrate justice.
MT: My friends in the diaspora here in Australia, some of whom have only come in the last year or year-and-a-half, many of them young people as well, have asked me to ask you what the young people can do to help. They are living and breathing Ukraine. And they said, ask Oleksandra what we should do and we’ll do it. So, I’m just the messenger, I’m just going to pass it on.
OM: First of all, I would like to express my enormous gratitude to all the people who want to do something, because we really do need their help.
There are two main reasons that we survived and didn’t fall in three days according to Putin’s plan. The first is that millions of people in Ukraine said: we don’t care if we are facing the world’s second [most powerful] army, we will fight for our freedom. But no less important is that ordinary people in countries all over the world took action. They held fundraisers, hosted Ukrainian refugees, organised public demonstrations, and urged their governments to provide Ukraine with weapons. Because it’s one thing to be ready to fight for your freedom and human dignity, but it’s another thing completely when you have to do it with your bare hands. Especially when you are dealing with an aggressor state that has veto power in the UN Security Council, nuclear weapons, a powerful military, a population of 140 million, and, at the moment it launched the full-scale invasion, the eleventh strongest economy in the world.
And all of a sudden we discovered that when people are ready to fight for freedom, and people in other countries are ready to support those people, then this spoils the Kremlin’s plans. And ordinary people become more powerful than the second most powerful army in the world.
The fact is that we still need help. There are a thousand and one ways you can help, and it’s not my place to tell anybody exactly what they should do. I am sure that people themselves know better. They know their own capacities, their local environment, their political communities.
But people continue to ask me about this — and often it’s the people who are already doing so much. Because this is not really the question they are asking. They are asking: What can I do to end this war? Because everything a single person does looks insignificant when viewed against the backdrop of the horror of full-scale war, since all their actions cannot put an end to the Russian atrocities.
The fact is that every effort matters. There is no such thing as an insignificant effort. We are people, we are not God, we cannot stop Russia with just our individual efforts. But without our actions and engagement this war will never end.
This feeling of helplessness is imagined. I remember when this feeling started showing up in society during the Revolution of Dignity, as the corrupt, authoritarian, pro-Russian government was brutally cracking down on the peaceful protest. At the time I was heading the Euromaidan SOS initiative, and every day we responded to hundreds of people who had been beaten, arrested, tortured, convicted on fabricated criminal charges. We were in a situation where the law was not working, and all the government organs that had been created to protect people were now trying to physically break the peaceful protest and the people involved.
That was when a group of Ukrainian artists produced a series of posters with very significant messages. One of these posters had an image of a droplet with the caption: ‘I’m a drop in the ocean’. And this is our response to the feeling of helplessness. Yes, I am a person, and maybe my efforts are a drop, but together we are an ocean. And together we can change history. And not only that. Yes, I am a person, and maybe my efforts are a drop that will not end anything, but without my efforts, without all these drops, none of this will ever end.
MT: I’ve just got one last question. If you could talk to yourself at the start of the full-scale invasion, and tell yourself something that you know now, that you didn’t know then, what would you tell yourself?
OM: I don’t know. There is so much that I have not reflected on yet, and there are certain moments I have forbidden myself from returning to. I still do not have words to express what we are going through right now, so I doubt I would be able to tell myself anything. I would probably just give myself a hug.
Oleksandra Matviichuk is the head of the Centre for Civil Liberties and coordinator of Euromaidan SOS. She has been at the forefront of documenting human rights violations and war crimes since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and is the author of a number of reports to various UN bodies, the Council of Europe, the European Union, the OSCE, and the International Criminal Court. In 2022, the Centre for Civil Liberties was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Maria Tumarkin is the author of four books of ideas, including Traumascapes and Otherland. Her most recent book, Axiomatic, won the Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award and was named by The New Yorker a top ten book of 2019. Tumarkin is a recipient of the 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize in the nonfiction category. She collaborates with musicians and visual artists, and writes pieces for performance and radio. She is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing programme at the University of Melbourne.
Visual: Anna Zvyagintseva, Kharkiv region, 2024
