Executive Director of HRPG “SICH” Olga Volynska’s speech at an online conference at the University of Berkeley (USA).
Good day everyone!
My name is Olha Volynska, I am a professional journalist, writer and executive director of the Human Rights Protection Group SICH. It is a great honor for me to speak here today.
When I started to work for a human rights organization in 2017 as a journalist, I was horrified at how much historically important information remains out of the public’s attention. Even during the war, and even in Ukraine. Therefore, it is not surprising that the civilized world knows so little about Ukraine until February 24, 2022. As well as the fact that the war began exactly 8 years before the full-scale invasion.
Today I will show you how Russia’s crimes in Ukraine progressed, grew and multiplied like a cancerous tumor – due to complete impunity. Almost a year after the full-scale invasion, we can safely say: there is not one war crime as described by international humanitarian law, which the Russian state would not have committed on the territory of Ukraine.
Look at this photo.
This is what remained of the house of a successful businessman Oleksandr from the village of Pisky near Donetsk. Russian forces destroyed not only his house, but also his business, his property, and his entire former life literally in one moment. This photo was taken in 2014. Probably, the Russian armed formations aimed at the Ukrainian checkpoint, which was nearby, and accidentally destroyed the life of an entire family.
And this photo flew around the world. Dnipro January 14, 2022. A Russian rocket took 46 lives in an ordinary residential building in my hometown of Dnipro. More than 200 destroyed apartments, about 80 injured. Six children were among the dead. This missile strike was aimed at a house with peaceful residents.
In the last year alone, Russia’s war against Ukraine deprived more than 2.4 million Ukrainians of their homes. However, this is only a preliminary number, since it is impossible to calculate the exact amount of destroyed property while hostilities are still ongoing.
That is, the absence of any reaction from the world led to complete impunity.
According to international humanitarian law, the destruction of civilian objects is considered a war crime. Russia is doing much more in Ukraine:
* Abduction of people
* Torture and ill-treatment in captivity
* Sexual violence
* Shooting humanitarian corridors
* Using the civilian population as a human shield – placing military equipment in schools, hospitals and residential buildings
* Forced mobilization and forced labor – digging trenches and building defense structures
* Appropriation of property of civilians
* Forced evictions from homes and forced deportations to Russia.
* Destruction of historical monuments, hospitals, churches, schools
Most of these crimes were committed by Russia in Ukraine since 2014, but the world learned about them only in 2022.
Prisoners and civilian hostages.
Russians have always been particularly cruel to Ukrainian volunteers – people of peaceful professions who went to defend the country since 2014. They were tortured, show executions were arranged, they were morally abused, and parts of their bodies were cut off.
Another target was active pro-Ukrainian activists, teachers, public figures, journalists, human rights defenders and even priests who could influence public opinion. Russians treated these people as cruelly as they did with the volunteers.
This place in occupied Donetsk is called Isolation. It was called the largest torture chamber of pro-Russian forces in the occupied territory of Ukraine. This is the base of the special operations forces of the Russian FSB. Proactive Ukrainian residents were kept here. No international organization, including the Committee of the Red Cross, had access to the territory. Terrible crimes have been committed here since 2014. Civilian Ukrainians – both men and women – were beaten with electric current, taped their hands and feet, starved, raped, forced to sing the Russian national anthem, made to kneel and made to bark like a dog. Just for fun. There was a doctor in the hospital. So this doctor, when a person was sick from abuse, gave him an injection to make him come to his senses, and then the abuse continued with new force.
This is the well-known Ukrainian journalist and writer Stas Aseev, who was arrested and thrown into Isolation for trying to objectively cover the events in Donetsk for well-known Ukrainian media. He was held captive for 2.5 years…
And this is professor of religious studies Ihor Kozlovsky, who was also interrogated and tortured in Isolation. Both Stas Aseev and Ihor Kozlovsky constantly told diplomats, ministers of European countries, journalists and international organizations about Isolation, because hundreds of innocent people remained at risk in Isolation. They nodded in response, but there were no real actions to stop Russia.
As a result, after the invasion, such Isolations appeared throughout the territory of Ukraine. Hundreds of Isolations, can you imagine? In occupied Kherson, the Russians set up a torture chamber on the territory of the former pre-trial detention center. At night, residents of nearby houses could not sleep because of the terrible screams that came from there.
This is Vitaly Lapchuk. He is also a university teacher, and in the past – a policeman. When the war began, he enrolled in the Territorial Defense, which consisted of peaceful Ukrainians who wanted to defend their city. Russian soldiers kidnapped him and killed him. Simply because he prevented them from capturing the city. He was not just killed: his body was mutilated, his hands were tied behind his back and thrown into the river. His body was accidentally found by a local diver. His house was also deliberately destroyed. He was a peaceful resident of a peaceful city.
Our organization is one of the participants in the “Tribunal for Putin” initiative – a coalition of public organizations that document Russia’s war crimes in different parts of the country. For almost a year, human rights defenders have documented more than 35,000 war crimes. The General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine has already documented 63,000 war crimes. And this number is growing every day.
Among the most cynical crimes of the aggressor are the shootings of evacuation corridors, when whole families of civilians tried to leave the dangerous territory to save their lives. They did not pose any danger, but the Russian military simply shot them – whole families. There is even a cemetery near Kyiv with shot civilians who tried to leave Mariupol and other cities of Ukraine.
The last photo I want to show today is a photo of 11-year-old Rostislav. Together with his parents, grandparents, and dogs, they tried to get to a safe place – and came across a column of Russian tanks, painted with symbols Z and V. They stopped 100 meters away, confident that the Russian military would not touch civilians. But they opened fire on them. The family fell to the ground, but the boy did not have time to orient himself and stood looking for his parents. He stood on a small hill and was clearly visible to the Russians. That is, they saw that it was a child… But they still shot. He died on the spot. But the military did not stop and tried to destroy the traces of the crime – they threw incendiary explosives. The grass was burning, but the parents extinguished it with their shoes and hands, only to take away and bury the body of their son. This story was told to me by the boy’s mother…
According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, almost 7,000 civilians died during the year of the full-scale war, the report says, but these data are incomplete. According to human rights organizations, the real numbers are at least 6-7 times higher. Experts say that in Mariupol alone, the number of dead may exceed 20,000 people.
“We hope that we will survive…” are the inscriptions left by Mariupol children on the walls of the Azov State Technical University, which became their shelter. But many of those who survived were forcibly removed from Ukraine. According to official data, almost 15,000 Ukrainian children have been abducted and taken from Ukraine to Russia, the Republic of Belarus, or to temporarily occupied territories since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. Imagine this as the population of a small town.
We are now documenting the war crimes of the aggressor – this huge soulless machine of fear, destruction and death – so that when an international mechanism appears – we can bring all the culprits to justice: both commanders and direct executors. But all this work is tons of pain, which is the responsibility of entire generations of Russians and their descendants.
Because no reparation, no compensation, no won court case, no award for a feat – can return the warmth of a loved one’s hand…
And to investigate the crime of Russian aggression at the level of the heads of state, a Special Military Tribunal should be established. So that those who commit such crimes understand that they will be punished.
And now I want to present our short film NeZlamni. This short 10-minute film is part of a trilogy that tells the story of women who were in Russian captivity. They became the first victims of Russian war crimes, but unfortunately not the last. With this film, we wanted to draw attention to the subject of prisoners and civilian hostages, as well as to their adaptation after capture. The film was presented in 8 countries and became an impetus for the adoption of legislative changes to protect prisoners in Ukraine.
Thanks for your attention!
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