Oleksandra Matviichuk warns that the Ukraine conflict is about international freedom, writ large, and whether laws can ultimately be trusted
Shortly before word spread through Washington that President Donald Trump had launched negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, a Ukrainian Nobel Peace Prize winner cautioned a Bush School DC audience that the conflict is about far more than territory or even Russian war crimes.
“This is a war between two systems: authoritarianism and democracy,” said Oleksandra Matviichuk, a human-rights lawyer who has documented Russian atrocities during conflict, which is entering its fourth year. “Ukraine is a tool (intended) to break the international order and impose (authoritarians’) vision.”
The authoritarians to which she was referring are the leaders of China, Iran and North Korea, plus Russian president Vladimir Putin. Those are vastly different cultures but their rulers’ uniting principle is simple, Matviichuk said: that everyday people are a tool to support the aims of the regime. And ultimately nothing more. To drive home one of the main point of her talk – that the worldview of Russia and its allies is fundamentally incompatible with United States values, such as holding individual freedoms as a highest good – Matviichuk noted the presence of North Korean soldiers assisting the Russians in Ukraine. International observers interviewed captured North Korean soldiers. Those soldiers struck interviewers as frighteningly cold, Matviichuk said. As if efforts to break their individuality to the needs of an authoritarian state had snuffed out their humanity.
“They were born in non-freedom … (without) space to express their feelings,” Matviichuk said. “They do not know what love is about. Can you imagine, not knowing what love is about?”
“THE ENTIRE U.N. … CAN’T STOP THIS”
In a question-and-answer session following her prepared remarks, Matviichuk told Bush School DC’s Kateryna Shynkaruk that the United Nations, as well as the broader, post-World War II international business and security order, “has collapsed.” She argues that an over-arching, law-driven organization is essential. Yet the law dissolved in the face of an onslaught that left one boy, Illya, a 10-year-old in Mariupol, clutching his mother as she froze to death, having dragged him out of the worst of the shelling despite her having been hit in the head. Matviichuk said Russian troops now deliberately shell residential buildings, schools, churches, museums and hospitals in Ukraine; attack in evacuation corridors; torture people in concentration camps; take Ukrainian children to Russia; and ban Ukrainian language and culture. The U.N. Court of Justice’s order for Russia to withdraw its troops did nothing to halt these crimes, or save Illya’s mother, Matviichuk said.
“The entire U.N. system of peace and security can’t stop this,” Matviichuk said. She thinks the will to stop them has been undermined, even in wealthy democracies, by two important developments: a sense of entitlement to freedoms won by previous generations and the rise of a digital culture in which falsehoods spread so quickly and freely that “we have a situation when people, even from small communities … have no shared reality.”
The world is now facing an existential question, Matviichuk said, one that is of particular importance to her as a lawyer: “Can we rely on the law, or does only brute force matter?”
Matviichuk sees a clear line of causation starting with governments disregarding the law, then depriving people of rights and freedoms, then committing abuses against their people and then, ultimately, turning that oppressiveness and aggression outward. Matviichuk said democracies ignore these connections at their own peril. It is not just Ukraine at risk, she says.
“As a human-rights lawyer,” Matviichuk said, “I have often heard that freedom is important, but (that) economic benefits, geopolitical interests and security concerns are even more significant. But the falseness of this approach is that freedom and peace are inextricably linked, and that countries that violate human rights … provide a threat not just for their own citizens, but to security and peace in general.”
“JUSTICE HAS AN IMPACT”
Matviichuk argues that there are still glimmers of hope that the law still matters, even as Ukrainians are killed. For instance, the United States cited legal grounds in claiming $300 billion in Russian assets. Ukrainian leaders are now urging the Trump administration to allow them to use the money to purchase U.S.-made weapons.
Matviichuk also said that, when the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Putin and fellow Russian official Maria Belova for alleged kidnapping of Ukrainian children, the head of Russia Today, a state-controlled broadcaster, appeared on the network to deliver a furious screed about Ukraine – not against the international court but against Russian generals who said privately that they would have to change their tactics “because we’ll be the next on the arrest warrant.”
“Pragmatic people think that justice doesn’t matter because it’s only about the past or the future, but not about the present,” Matviichuk said. But “it’s working, because justice has an impact on the present. When we just start decisive legal actions, even if (only some) Russians start to doubt that this time they will avoid responsibly … we can save thousands, and thousands, and thousands of lives.”
