Oleksandra Matviichuk / Foto: Public Domain, Voice of America
Ruslands krigsforbrydelser og bortførelse af ukrainske børn. Interview med Oleksandra Matviichuk, leder af menneskerettighedsorganisationen Center for Civil Liberties, som blev tildelt Nobels Fredspris i 2022.
Interview af Kenneth Pico Rasmussen. Foretaget på engelsk. Let redigeret for at øge læsbarheden.
I am here with Oleksandra Matviichuk. Could you please introduce yourself and your organization shortly?
My name is Oleksandra Matviichuk. I am a human rights lawyer, head of the Center for Civil Liberties.
It’s a human rights organization based in Kiev. And we are documenting war crimes in this war which Russia has launched against Ukraine for 11 years already. And while this war turns people into numbers, we are returning people their names.
How did you get involved in this work with the children’s group at the center? How did they get involved?
We are documenting different kinds of crimes. We document how Russian troops deliberately shell in residential buildings, schools, churches, museums and hospitals, attacking evacuation corridors, torturing people in filtration camps, forcibly taking Ukrainian children to Russia, how they ban Ukrainian language and culture and abducting, robbing, raping and killing civilians in the occupied territories.
And that is why among our crimes which we have recorded, there are also crimes against children.
How do you raise awareness of this matter, both in the crimes against Ukrainians, the war crimes and the crimes against the children? How do you create awareness?
We provide this documentation not just for national archives, but first and foremost to achieve justice.
We want that sooner or later all people who committed these crimes by their own hands, as well as Putin and top political leadership and high military command of the Russian state will be brought accountable. So this is our main goal. But also parallel, we provide information about what’s going on in this Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.
Because we want not just to document these crimes, we want to stop it. And in order to stop it, the international community has to react properly. And that’s why we present our reports in different international platforms, in order to push the world to take necessary political decisions which can help to stop this bloody war.
What is this matter about the abducted children? It has been a matter for some years now. Why is this suddenly a matter that is very important at the moment?
Because children is the future of every nation. And these crimes against children, which was the reason for the first arrest warrant for international criminal court against Vladimir Putin, president of Russia and his child commissioner Maria Lipova-Belova, it’s not just a war crime, it’s a part of a more broader genocidal policy, which Russia introduced against Ukrainian state. Because these Ukrainian children, when they were brought forcibly to Russia, they were put in Russian re-education camps. They are told that they are not Ukrainian children, that they are Russian children.
Do you find it difficult to raise awareness about the kidnapped children cases in the media, especially here in the West?
The attention to the children is always very high, but the problem is that we live in a very difficult world and Ukraine is not the only hotspot on the globe. Children are suffering in Sudan, children are suffering in Afghanistan and a lot of other places.
And that is why we don’t just want to show more and more cases of suffering of children, we want this problem to be solved. Do you have any data on where the kids are? Sorry, one moment. I will check.
Do you have any data on where kids go in Russia? Do they mostly go to poor regions or is it the urban population that adopts them?
We do not provide such research, but our partners did. And probably I will draw attention to the brilliant report of the Humanitarian Research Lab of Yale University. They revealed the destiny of several hundreds of children.
They made a mapping of their journey and the result convincingly proved that children are taken in different parts of Russia. Which is a huge problem, especially taking into account that adoptive families can change not just name and surname, but also date of birth and place of birth of children. And if this child is very small, like two years old, or three years old, it means that it’s very difficult to track his destiny after this child was delivered in some far region of Russian Federation.
We also talked about maybe that families have an economic incentive from the government. Russia is a very poor country, frankly speaking, and there are a lot of depressive regions.
And for people from these regions to take Ukrainian child is just a way to earn money, because they start to receive some money every month. And that’s why they accepted Ukrainian child, not because they want to love children or want to take care of them, but because they need money. And it’s put child in a very vulnerable position from physical abuse, from sexual violence.
It provides a child an environment without love, and nobody can protect them, especially taking into account that this is a Ukrainian child. Yes, exactly. We saw in the movie and heard reports that there should be documented the cases of suicides among these children.
Yes, there are suicides. We don’t know the real scope of the problem. The last bright case, it was case which was happened in December last year, when Alexander, who was forcibly separated with his sister, Kristina, and was adopted by family in Krasnodar region, committed suicide and hacked himself.
And before he committed suicide, he sent the voice message to his friends and told that adoptive family show very directly that they don’t need him. Do you plan to raise awareness in the United Nations Security Council and the EU Parliament about this? This is what we are literally doing for all these years, but we need not just awareness, we need action, because childhood has an expiration date, and we have no time. We have to react immediately.
Do you believe, or do the Ukrainian people believe, that abducting children is this the work of the Russian government or the work of the Russian people?
When we speak about this war, it’s very obvious that it’s not just a war of one person, Vladimir Putin. Unfortunately, the majority of Russians supported this war, and it’s very visible when we read the result of the sociological focus group, when people said, yes, war is not good, but if our president started this war, it means that it’s needed. And if he started this war, we have to win this war.
And unfortunately, this perception is also based on the long-lasting tradition of unity. Russians committed horrible crimes in Chechnya, in Moldova, in Georgia, in Mali, in Libya, in Syria. They have never been punished for this.
They believe they can do whatever they want. And they really think that they have a right to invade other countries, to kill people there, to erase their identity. Russians’ culture is imperialistic.
And the main goal of this war is not to occupy some part of Ukrainian territory. Putin wanted to occupy and to destroy the whole Ukrainian gulf and forcibly restore the Russian empire. And unfortunately, the majority of Russians, even in the 21st century, still see their glory in the forcible restoration of the Russian empire.
Yes, I totally agree. Should the question about the kidnapped children be a condition for a truce or a peace?
I think there is no conflict between truce and peace. These terms are very interconnected, because we can’t reach peace, I mean sustainable and just peace, without justice.
And justice is based on truce. I mean truce as in the fighting will stop and the lines will freeze and then you start to discuss peace. So the question is, should it be connected to the stopping of the fighting or the negotiations of the peace? But a ceasefire doesn’t mean peace.
Ceasefire means that armies stop to kill each other and we have to find a long-term solution. Ceasefire is just a precondition to further the peace process. And we have to find a way to restore international order and to push Russia to release occupied territories.
Especially taking into account that Russian troops introduced terror against civilians in these occupied territories. People who live there, live in a grey zone, they have no tools to defend their rights, their freedom, their property, their lives and their beloved ones. Russian occupation is not just changing one flag to another.
Russian occupation means torture, rapes, abductions, forcible adoption of your own children, denial of your identity, filtration camps and mass graves. What is your strategy for getting the kids back? It’s a good question because unfortunately Russia ignores all provisions of international law and all decisions of international organizations. And there is no easy answer to how to push Russia to return Ukrainian children back to their families.
And that is why the international coalition was created and they developed the Bring Kids Back plan. And this is a complex strategy which includes economic sanctions, diplomatic actions, political pressure, other tools. And we have just to continue everything, continue trying and we have no right to give up.
We have to fight for the future of our children.
Ruslands Præsident Vladimir Putin og Ruslands Kommissær for børns rettigheder Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova er eftersøgt af Den Internationale Straffedomstol for at stå bag bortførelsen af mere end 19.000 ukrainske børn.
Den Internationale Straffedomstol i Haag / Foto: OSeveno,Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
So you want governments to also raise this case against the Russians in further negotiations or dealings and not just NGOs?
I think that people have to be the priority of any negotiation process. And that is why we started the People First campaign.
It’s an international campaign. A lot of organizations from different countries supported it. And we demand that first what has to be discussed and done is immediate release of thousands of illegally detained Ukrainian civilians.
It’s the immediate return of Ukrainian children. It’s an exchange of prisoners of war because people have to be at the center of any peace negotiations.
Is there anything that you want to say or tell Denmark, the media, the politicians? And what can we do?
What can you help with? Probably I will say two things. First, I would like to use this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to people in Denmark for solidarity, for the support which we received all these years of this war. And it always reminds us that even when you can’t rely on the legal instruments because Russia ignored them, you can still rely on people.
And we are very grateful. Ukrainians will never forget people in Denmark and people in other countries who were with us in this dramatic time of our history. And second, what I want to convey is that we are fighting for something which has no limitation in national borders.
We are fighting for freedom and we live in a very interconnected world. Only the spread of freedom makes our world safer. I want to say thank you for this opportunity to hear your viewpoints about it.
And from the ‘Freedom for Ukraine’ we can say that we fully support this case.
Center for Civil Liberties
Center for Civil Liberties (CCL) blev stiftet i Kyiv i 2007. I sine tidlige år lagde organisationen pres på myndighederne for at sikre, at Ukraine udviklede sig til et fuldgyldigt demokrati og en retsstat. Et centralt mål var Ukraines tiltrædelse af Den Internationale Straffedomstol i Haag.
Da Rusland annekterede Krimhalvøen fra Ukraine i 2014 og støttede udbryderrepublikkerne Donestsk og Luhansk, begyndte centret at dokumentere sager om ulovlig fængsling og andre overgreb mod civilbefolkningen i disse områder.
Efter Ruslands angreb på Ukraine i februar 2022 koncentrerede CCL sig om at dokumentere krigsforbrydelser mod civilbefolkningen begået af russiske soldater i de besatte områder. Dette arbejde blev udført i samarbejde med organer som Den Internationale Straffedomstol. Organisationen engagerede sig også i en vigtig indsats for at dokumentere tvangsflytning af civile fra besatte områder i Ukraine til Rusland.
Center for Civil Liberties hjemmeside