‘Accountability gap’: Nobel peace prize winner warns Russian war crimes going unpunished


Oleksandra Matviichuk has a point she wants to make. The Ukrainian lawyer heads the Centre for Civil Liberties, a human rights organisation that this month jointly won the Nobel peace prize. And she wants to use her platform to call for international action against Russian human rights violations now.

The body she heads has patiently documented more than 21,000 examples of war crimes committed by occupying Russian forces since 2014, including many from after the invasion in February. But, speaking quietly and with controlled emotion, she complains: “I haven’t any legal instrument to stop the Russian atrocities” – no immediate way of bringing perpetrators to court.

The criminality appears vast when listed. “After the large-scale invasion, we every day documented different kinds of war crimes, like intentional shelling of residential buildings, churches, hospitals, schools, the shelling of evacuation corridors,” Matviichuk says. “We received requests for help from people in the occupied territories because they were abducted, tortured; we recorded sexual violence, extrajudicial killings.”

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