This issue of the London Ukrainian Review is dedicated to justice. It explores how impunity for Russia’s crimes of the past breeds its genocidal war against Ukraine in the present. Ukrainians’ fight for justice is viewed from the standpoint of the Sixtiers and the Maidan generations, through the eyes of an art historian, lawyer, ex-serviceman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
On a bright Sunday morning, three women face the portrait of a fourth. The photo is mounted above a grave carpeted by flowers and white marble pebbles. Above the portrait, the flags of Ukraine and a famous volunteer paramedics’ battalion flap in the wind. Another, older woman approaches the grave and touches the face in the frame gently. The three younger women kneel and lower their heads. Nobody utters a word.
Minutes pass, and only when we stand do I make eye contact with the mother of the paramedic, journalist, and activist Iryna Tsybukh, callsign ‘Cheka’. She was killed in May 2024, two days before her twenty-sixth birthday. I barely touch her mother Oksana Tsybukh’s shoulder before walking away with my two friends, a writer-turned-paramedic and a scholar-turned-volunteer.
We walk past hundreds of graves decorated with Ukrainian national flags and the standards of various brigades of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Since spring 2022, Ukrainian defenders from Lviv have been buried here, in the Field of Mars. Having lived in the city for a year, I have watched a dozen new military graves appear here each week — of people who used to be writers, farmers, mechanics, teachers, construction workers, and translators. Alongside the mass burials of Bucha and Izium, bombed residential buildings in Kharkiv and Dnipro, flooded lands south of the Kakhovka dam, and burnt grain fields in my native Zaporizhzhia, the monstrous growth of the Field of Mars in Lviv has become a symbol of Russia’s brutality. Expanding daily just forty kilometres away from the EU border, this cemetery also symbolises the outside world’s denial in facing Russia’s genocidal actions.
This monstrous growth should have been nipped in the bud. The fact that it wasn’t fills Ukrainians with rage. What can keep a wounded and bereaved society from succumbing to the thirst for revenge?
Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, one word has been a constant presence in Ukrainian discourse. That word is ‘justice’. The current scale and brutality of Russian aggression are the result of impunity for the crimes of the past. This need for justice at last is what this issue of the London Ukrainian Review addresses.
There has never been a reckoning with the centuries of Russian colonial violence against Ukrainians and other subjugated peoples of the Russian Empire. This violence has long encompassed an epistemic dimension. Moscow has appropriated the colonised nations’ heritage, obliterated their institutional traditions, and erased their place in the world’s cultural history. When a country’s cultural and intellectual contributions are attributed to its imperialist neighbour, that country disappears from the mental maps of the global community and ignoring its fight for sovereignty and independence becomes all too easy. Katia Denysova’s essay, ‘Art for Justice: What Ukraine’s Artistic Heritage Teaches Us about Russian Imperialism’, shines a spotlight on the restoration of justice in art history.
The international discussion of Soviet repressions has long focused on the fates of Russian dissidents. However, other nations’ dissident movements were the ones that succeeded in destabilising the Soviet regime eventually leading to its demise. From the mass Crimean Tatar dissent to Ukrainian post-Chornobyl eco-activists, non-Russian dissidents who were fighting for justice as well as national liberation not only enjoyed far lesser recognition abroad but also often paid the ultimate price for their ideals. In 1985, while the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was hailed for glasnost and perestroika, Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus died in a forced labour camp in Perm, Russia. Bohdan Tokarskyi discusses Stus’s generation of the Sixtiers and their vision of justice in the introductory piece for Stus’s poems ‘I can’t survive this sleety winter’ and ‘They beat our snow-covered heads’, translated by Nina Murray and Tokarskyi.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the global community has turned a blind eye to modern Russia’s colonial wars, instigation of violence, and support for autocratic regimes worldwide. The invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was preceded by the war in Georgia in 2008, the subjugation of Ichkeria during two Chechen Wars in 1994–1996 and 1999–2009, and the wars in Transnistria (1990–1992), South Ossetia (1991–1992), and Abkhazia (1992–1993). In 2015, Russia joined forces with Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, also supported by Iran, to crush Syrian opposition. Today, we need to take stock of the failures to bring Russia to justice for its aggression and violations of human rights in all these armed conflicts. We also need the failures of the past to inform and galvanise our actions in the present.
As the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk explains in an interview with the Kharkiv-born and Australia-based writer Maria Tumarkin, we need to break with the ‘stereotypical’ post-World War II ‘approach to justice, where the latter is considered unattainable as long as we are in the midst of war’. New technologies and transnational collaborations enable us to pursue justice even when Russia’s genocidal war is far from over — and thus help bring an end to the impunity which enabled it. Fighting for justice while fighting the war, Ukraine can set a precedent which will reform international law thus benefiting societies globally.
In her policy overview, Kateryna Busol traces how vital changes to legal systems are advanced by Ukraine domestically and internationally. Since 2014, not only did Russia’s crimes in Ukraine go largely unnoticed by outside observers, but so did Ukraine’s experience in investigating them. From improvements in the cooperation between the state and civil society to women’s leadership, LGBTQIA+ rights, and extending justice beyond the courtroom, Ukraine has been dealing with domestic challenges while developing expertise that is of unique value worldwide.
Keeping at their vital work, Ukrainians with diverse experiences search for a common denominator in their pursuit of justice. What does justice mean for a Ukrainian who grew up in the lawless nineties, participated in the Revolution of Dignity in now-occupied Donetsk, engaged in the peace process in eastern Ukraine, took up arms to defend his country in 2022, spent months as a prisoner of war in Russian captivity, and returned to defending his homeland after his release? Yevhen Shybalov’s ‘The Common Denominator’ is both a personal story and a portrait of one Ukrainian generation. Comparing justice to the air we breathe, Shybalov notes, ‘we instantly feel when [justice is] missing. And we are prepared to fight, kill, and die to restore it’.
The theme of justice has been visually interpreted by the contemporary Ukrainian artist Anna Zviagyntseva’s film photography. Depicting everyday objects and mundane events, the visuals contrast and create a generative tension with the textual content of this London Ukrainian Review issue. As Zviagyntseva comments, ‘Repeating small actions is actually a happy way to experience the time you have. In war, [the invaders] constantly try to take this horizon and this outlook away from all of us. May the age-old wish that sociologist Dmytro Zaiets expressed as “I also want children, I want a house, I want to grow tomatoes” remain undeniable’.
As the pieces in this issue show, justice for Ukraine is not limited to what plays out in prison cells and courtrooms alone. It extends to how this war is remembered, how the stories of Ukrainians are documented and passed on, how the old crimes are being accounted for as new legal avenues for the rule of law open up, thanks to the daily efforts of Ukrainian society.
Visual: Anna Zvyagintseva, Rivne region, 2021
