![War Against Human Rights with Oleksandra Matviichuk [PODCAST]](http://4liberty.eu/phidroav/2025/06/Liberal-Europe-Podcast-2024-9-1024x1024.png "War Against Human Rights with Oleksandra Matviichuk [PODCAST]")
What is the role of human rights advocacy in a full-scale Russian war in Ukraine? What part do Europeans play in this struggle? And how to fight the growing sense of indifference? Leszek Jazdzewski (Fundacja Liberte!) talks with Oleksandra Matviichuk, a human rights defender who works on issues in Ukraine and the OSCE region. She heads the human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties, which was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.
Leszek Jazdzewski (LJ): What is the role of a human rights lawyer in your organization, in a world which is not just against your country, Ukraine, but also against the human rights as such?
Oleksandra Matviichuk (OM): I have been applying the law to defend people and human dignity for many years. Now, however, I am in a situation in which the law does not work anymore. Right now, Russian troops deliberately hit residential buildings, schools, museums, churches, and hospitals, attack evacuation corridors, torture people in filtration camps, they have forcibly taken Ukrainian children to Russia in order to bring them up as Russians, and are abducting, robbing, raping, and killing civilians in the occupied territories.
We all observe how the entire UN system of peace and security cannot solve this. While this war turns people into numbers, what we are literally doing is that we are giving these people their names back – because people are not numbers, and life of each and every person matters.
We might ask, why is freedom so essential, and why does it have no national borders? I want to remind everyone that freedom is not something that is simply written in conventions and declarations – it is not merely some lofty words spoken by UN top officials. Where there is no space for freedom, there is no love.
I once read the article of film producer Vitaly Mansky, who created a famous documentary about North Korea called “Under the Sun” (2015). He said that he has never seen in ‘chemistry’ in North Korea. And I told myself, yes, that certainly makes sense. Because if human life does not matter, then you do not need chemistry. Similarly, without freedom, there is no law, because we need freedom. Without it, we will return to the level of our basic biological instincts.
LJ: How do you work against the growing sense of cynicism and indifference, when people stop to care, whereas Russian atrocities still continue?
OM: Cynicism is a disease, or a virus that has been artificially created. The current authoritarian regimes have no common ideology, but they have common narratives. They try to convince us that authoritarianism is strong and secure. Nevertheless, democracy means something, which is why they try to combat it with humanistic ideas like human rights, independent speech, or freedom of the press.
Authoritarian leaders try to convince us that facts have no meaning and that truth does not matter, so there is no need to defend them. They poison people with cynicism and apathy, and they are doing this deliberately because they need passive people who voluntarily reject their responsibility. It is much easier to govern such kind of people.
Moreover, there is a tendency to normalize evil. Unfortunately, it is very natural, because after the first period of shock, people start to return to their current affairs. We saw it when we look at the war in Sudan. Do people remember that this war is still going on? That this war has been going on already for 23 years?
Just several months ago, I met with my colleagues from Sudan from a human rights organization. They told me horrible things. They said that survivors of sexual violence started to commit suicide – young women, young girls. Because when they were raped for the first time and relocated to another place, the armed groups came to this other place and raped them again and repeatedly. So, they have started to lose hope that this war will ever end.
However, people in Poland, people in Ukraine, in Switzerland, France, or Brazil, they do not think about the war in Sudan every day. Therefore, unfortunately, it is human nature. But what did this Russian war for Russian? Something very different. Because Putin started the large-scale war against Ukraine not because he wanted to get more of the Ukrainian land, but because he wanted to destroy the whole Ukraine and move further. He sees Ukraine as a bridge to Poland, as a bridge to Europe. His logic is historical in its nature. He dreams about a forcible restoration of the Russian empire.
Knowing all that, you cannot normalize evil. You cannot forget about this war because you have to be aware of the fact that you are safe only because Ukrainians are still fighting.
LJ: What should happen now, especially since the United States might be withdrawing from their continuous support of Ukraine? Do you think the European Union alone can do it? Is any sort of a peace deal possible in the near future?
OM: If we think that Putin does not want to be remembered in world history as a person who started a large-scale war and killed hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers in this war just to occupy a territory, it is wishful thinking. He does not care about human losses in Russia or in Ukraine. All he cares about his legacy.
Putin does not want peace. He wants to achieve his historical goal. And we have to take it seriously. This means that Europe has no choice. If Europe will not be able to defend itself, even without the support from the United States, then we will observe the world where the decades of freedom and a sustainable economic growth (which Europe had after the fall of the Berlin Wall) will end and decades of survival will begin. The question is whether you still have time to get prepared for this battle between authoritarianism and democracy – and this time is paid with our Ukrainian blood.
LJ: I absolutely agree that it is very much in the interest of Europeans (especially Eastern Europeans) to support the sustained efforts of Ukrainians to fight Russians. Will there be a certain point when people might decide that the war needs to be stopped even if we do not achieve everything we wanted?
OM: Russians have no possibility to decide. Putin does not care about Russian citizens, so he will not stop. If you ask about Ukrainians, we have no alternative either. Look at what is going on in the occupied territories. Russian troops impose terror on civilians in order to maintain control, because it is one thing to occupy the territories, but it is another thing to colonize them.
In order to colonize the territories, they impose terror on civilians. They physically exterminate local people who are active in their communities (mayors, journalists, children, writers, musicians, teachers, environmentalists, priests, and others). They are destroying local communities as such. They banned Ukrainian language, culture, and heritage. They took Ukrainian children, separated them from their families, and are bringing them to Russia. Dozens of thousands of Ukrainian children are supposed to be adopted by Russian families, who will bring them up as Russians.
All of this shows that we have no alternative, because if we stop resisting to this evil, it means we will cease to exist.
LJ: What is the fate of the children captured by Putin and the Russians. Will it ever be possible to get them back? What will happen to them if they end up being brainwashed and used by the Russians for their own agenda?
OM: We have to do everything we can. Our biggest enemy is time, because children are very vulnerable to erosion of their identity. Children are very vulnerable to militarization. And the Russians deliberately teach Ukrainian children how to use weapons, how to march or wear a military uniform. They created the image of war as something attractive, because they need these children to become Putin’s soldiers in the wars to come, not just for the war with Ukraine.
Childhood has an expiration date. Russia continues to occupy, deport, militarize, and erode their identity. Children lose their childhood. We will lose these children. So even though I cannot predict the future, I am absolutely confident that we have to do everything we can to save them.
LJ: What should Ukraine do to fight the ongoing propaganda without becoming a repressive country toward its own Russian-speaking citizens? How can Ukrainians still protect the freedom of speech and allow for diversity of opinions while at the same time defend itself against Russia?
OM: There is no simple answer to this complex question. We start between two logics. On the one hand, it is the logic of the war; on the other hand, the logic of democratization.
The logic of the war dictates centralization, whereas the logic of democratization – decentralization. The former stands for the limitation of human rights and freedom due to security requirements. For example, military censorship is legally introduced during the war. Meanwhile, the latter indicates the opposite and states that you have to expand the space for rights and freedoms.
We try to find balance between these two logics. It is very difficult, frankly speaking, but we have no luxury to postpone one of these tasks for the post-war period. In order to survive, we have to change. We have to become stronger. And our source of resilience is people, local democracy, civil society, and freedom.
We, as a people, always have to remember what we are fighting for. That this war has not only a military but also a value dimension. Putin started this war not in February 2022, but in February 2014, after the collapse of the Soviet regime in Ukraine due to the revolution of dignity. When we got the chance for a democratic transition, when we got a chance to secure freedom of speech, in order to stop us on this path, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Putin occupied Crimea, part of the eastern regions of Ukraine, and three years ago, he extended this war to the large-scale invasion. Because Putin is not afraid of NATO, he is afraid of the idea of freedom. Therefore, we simply must remember that we are fighting for freedom. We are fighting for our democratic choice. And this mental ground, the moral intent of this fight will help us find the right balance. However, it is no easy feat, for sure.
Let us be honest, we are a nation in transition. Just eleven years ago, we were living and working under an authoritarian ruler. Meanwhile, people in other European countries had the luxury to spend decades on building sustainable democratic institutions. We have had just eleven years to make a democratic transition, and we are doing this not during a peaceful time, but during war – and for the last three years during a full-scale war.
Certainly, a lot has to be done. We are not perfect – unfortunately, we are far from it. Plenty needs to be done in the area of the rule of law – we need to build the courts which are independent and can provide justice. Moreover, we need to completely reform the police, to have the police who serve people. However, what is important is that we are on the right track. And it is extremely important to be on the right track. People in Russia choose another track, and this track is not right.
LJ: What is the secret behind the quick transition from the times of Viktor Yanukovych, the Euromaidan, through the Russian invasion of Crimea, to eight years later, when everyone in the world was taken by surprise by how resilient Ukraine has become?
OM: The secret is that the world looks at Ukraine and our region through the Russian lens. The world does not know Ukrainians, not really. Typically, when you try to understand a country, you take different ratings. And if you look at the economic development or the development of state bodies, Ukraine is at the bottom of these ratings. However, when you take the rating of social capital, power of the people, then we are at the top.
Therefore, ironically, Western democracies forget that people have power. They look at our potential only from the perspective of our state institutions. But when millions of Ukrainians started to support the state institutions during the first days, weeks, and months of the full-scale Russian war, then it suddenly became obvious that people have power – that it is the people who create history.
LJ: Is it possible to reconcile the perspective of fighting authoritarianism and for democracy with the perspective of the young generation, who are primarily fighting for social justice within their own democracies?
OM: The threat of losing freedom is real. 80% of people in the world live in societies that are not free or partially free. The people who are in the minority, who have a luxury to vote for whom they want to vote, to say what they want to say, to fight for social justice and try to change the country for the better, and who are not being prosecuted for this, jailed or killed, they can lose their imperfect democracy. Because we saw that more and more people in democratic countries start to exchange their freedom for something else. This oftentimes happens due to populist claims, for economic benefits, for some promises, but first and foremost for their own comfort, because they start to take freedom for granted, like oxygen.
They forget what does it mean to live in a totalitarian regime. If they remembered, they would fight for this even unperfect democracy. Because they would remember that the alternative is hell. As such, it is much better to have an imperfect democracy and to repair it – to develop this system, to demand social justice or other changes, but at least you have the right to do it.
In authoritarianism, you can be persecuted just for your words. You can be jailed, tortured, sexually abused, and killed, and this is all normal in an authoritarian regime. Therefore, we have to work on two tasks in parallel. We have to develop our imperfect democracies and not avert our eyes from the problems which we have, but at the same time, we have to defend our imperfect democracies, because the alternative is pure hell.
LJ: What should we think about the fact that many people accuse their governments of hypocrisy because they support Ukraine, but do not stand up for Gaza and the atrocities happening there?
OM: I would respond with facts. South Africa sent an appeal to the UN Court of Justice against Israel in order to support the people in Gaza. At the same time, South Africa said that they are neutral when we speak about the Russian warfare, or the fact that Russia negates the very existence of Ukraine. This is the same double standards, the same hypocrisy.
Let us look at Brazil. I was in Brazil during the G20, and I saw a lot of protests in support of the people in Gaza. The president of Brazil refused to come to the Basel Peace Forum in Switzerland because he told Ukraine that we cannot discuss the issue of war without Russia. Okay, he probably has a point. But what about Ukraine at the G20? The president of Brazil did not want to discuss the issue of the war with Ukraine without Russia, but he was okay to discuss the same issues with Russia without Ukraine. They even did not invite the official Ukrainian delegation to be present when they discussed the Russian war in Ukraine. Therefore, this is also the same double standard and the same hypocrisy.
The hypocrisy in politics has always existed around the world. There is always a tendency to use some legitimate goals like social justice or human rights as a political tool. However, the problem is much deeper.
When I spoke with my friends and colleagues, human rights defenders from the countries of Africa, they told me that they support Ukraine personally, but they think it is unfair that so much attention is on Ukraine while they have their own war. For instance, the war in Sudan does not get the same attention. I feel their pain because for eight years before the full-scale war started, nobody had been interested in what was going on in Ukraine.
I have been running the first human rights organization which sent groups to Crimea and to eastern regions of Ukraine, where we started to work on the horrible practices of legal detention, sexual violence, and torturing civilians in the occupied territories. I personally interviewed hundreds of people. They told me how they were beaten, raped, smashed into wooden boxes. Their fingers were cut, their nails were drilled through. They were being electrically shocked on their genitals. We sent numerous reports to the Council of Europe, the OSCE, and the EU. We shared these reports with foreign governments. Nobody was interested. Nobody. We received this attention only when the full-scale war started. Then, suddenly, European countries started to understand that they will be the next – that after Ukraine, Putin will attack Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and so on, and so forth.
As such, we were in the same position. Even my colleagues from the countries of Africa started to notice that the war is going on only after 2022, despite the fact that it has been going on already for eleven years. Right now, I tell them that the situation is even worse. Because before, we could believe the illusion that all of the problems are because of the lack of attention – and that once we get this attention, the situation will improve. But look at what is going on. In the first years of the full-scale Russian war, all eyes were on Ukraine, but Russia did not stop. It means that the situation is even worse.
We should not compete for attention with each other, but unite. And we have to start a fundamental reform of the international system of peace and security. Because it is not working. It does not provide us with security, nor does it guarantee human rights for people. Therefore, we have to reform it in such a way so that people who live in any country are guaranteed the security and human rights.
This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with Movimento Liberal Social and Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.