A ‘tribunal for Putin’ from a Nobel Prize-winning Ukrainian rights defender
Kyiv, Ukraine – Years before Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine began in 2022, Oleksandra Matviichuk and her Center for Civil Liberties, a Kyiv-based human rights group, were already documenting the experiences of Ukrainians captured by Russian soldiers, intelligence operatives and pro-Moscow separatists.
“I personally interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people who survived Russian captivity,” she told Al Jazeera in her office in central Kyiv.
The survivors told her and her colleagues how they’d been beaten, raped and electrocuted. Some had their fingers cut off and nails torn away or drilled in makeshift prisons and concentration camps known as “basements”.
Dozens more were allegedly executed arbitrarily, found dead with evidence of torture on their bodies or are still reported as missing.