Opinion: In Ukraine, a river of horrors has swelled to a flood
Since my organization, the Center for Civil Liberties, was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize last year, I’ve met a lot of people around the world. They often ask what motivates me to keep on going amid this terrible conflict. How do I manage to get up every day, eat breakfast, have coffee and then turn to my daily work as a human rights lawyer: documenting the now thousands of hideous atrocities that have been committed — and are being still committed — by the Russian Federation’s armed forces against the people of Ukraine.
During those first weeks of the war last year, it was anger that fueled me. Anger that these Russians with their tanks and artillery and planes should decide they had the right to take away our freedom; anger that they should decide we Ukrainians can’t have a democratic future.
Like other Ukrainians who believe a government should serve and protect its people, rather than plunder them, I know how much we have achieved in rooting out the corrupt legacies of Soviet rule that have lingered so long in our system. I know how much blood was spilled in Kyiv’s Maidan Square during our Revolution of Dignity in 2014 by people who wanted to break from Russia’s toxic political grip.