The human rights lawyer has spent her career documenting Russian war crimes. Now she’s trying to ensure they are punished – whether Russia wins or loses on the battlefield.
For more than a decade, Oleksandra Matviichuk has borne witness to some of the worst things human beings can do to one another.
As head of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, the human rights organisation awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, she has documented torture, enforced disappearances, political imprisonment and, since Russia's full-scale invasion, thousands of alleged war crimes. Her work has taken her from occupied territories to international forums, where she has become one of the most prominent voices arguing for accountability.
Matviichuk spoke to BIRN a week after what many legal advocates consider a breakthrough in that effort.
On May 15, during a meeting of the Council of Europe, 36 countries and the EU expressed their intention to join the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression Against Ukraine – a body mandated to prosecute senior Russian political and military leaders for the decision to launch the invasion in 2022, and the second tribunal in history, after Nuremberg, dedicated to the crime of aggression itself.
A “revolutionary step”, in Matviichuk's words.
“For decades, Russia has used war to advance its geopolitical interests, and war crimes as a method of warfare,” she said. “All the hell we are living through in Ukraine is the result of decades of impunity. Russia committed horrible crimes in Chechnya, Georgia, Mali, Libya and Syria, and was never punished. They came to believe they could do whatever they wanted.”
She points to a 2023 report by the human rights organisation Memorial, which examined Russian military conduct in Chechnya, Syria and Ukraine, and found striking similarities across the conflicts – what Matviichuk calls “the same war-crime playbook”.
The lesson she draws is not only about the past. “We must break this chain of wars, this chain of crimes, this chain of impunity,” she said. “Not only for the people of Ukraine who have already suffered from it, but to prevent this from happening to another nation.”
The Ukrainian flag at half-mast at the Council of Europe headquarters in Strasbourg owing to multiple Russian attacks on civilians over the previous 48 hours, 15 May 2026. Photo: Council of Europe
A different kind of Nuremberg Trial
The proposed Special Tribunal would fill a gap left by the International Criminal Court (ICC), which can investigate war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide committed in Ukraine, but lacks jurisdiction over the act of launching the attack itself.
The idea for the Special Tribunal was first floated within days of the invasion by Philippe Sands, a renowned human rights lawyer and a University College London professor, who modelled his proposal on the 1945 Nuremberg Trials. He argued that an overarching tribunal is necessary to try the leaders responsible for the act of invasion itself, not just the war crimes that followed.
For Matviichuk, however, the crucial difference between the two tribunals is that Nuremberg was “a victorious trial” – Nazi war criminals were tried only after their regime had collapsed.
“We are challenging that logic because justice is not the privilege of winners,” she said. “Our historical task is to make justice independent of when and how the war ends.”
Significant obstacles remain: sitting heads of state enjoy immunity, and any future prosecution would depend on gaining custody over suspects. But advocates argue that investigations can proceed regardless, evidence collected, and indictments prepared long before defendants appear in court.
The urgency is not abstract. As the peace talks initiated by the Trump administration unfolded, the war has continued to kill civilians at an accelerating rate. According to the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, civilian casualties rose by 31 per cent in 2025 compared with the previous year, and the trend has continued into 2026.
“The American negotiators who launched this peace process focused on natural resources and geopolitical interests, not on people,” Matviichuk said. “That sent a clear signal to Russia that people do not matter.”
Nobel laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk delivers speech at the Kyiv Security Forum, on 23 January 2023, Ukraine. Photo: U.S. Embassy in Kyiv / Wikimedia Commons
Trapped in trauma
Matviichuk speaks softly and rarely raises her voice. Despite years spent documenting atrocities, she remains strikingly resistant to cynicism – a matter of conscious choice, she explained. What concerns her about Ukraine’s post-war future is not only the physical devastation, but the possibility that Ukrainians might carry the war’s damage inside themselves long after the fighting ends.
“I’m very worried that my nation can be trapped in a position of victim,” she said. “Offence [a sense of having been wronged] is the strongest poison ever.”
The dange…
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