Address by

Oleksandra MATVIICHUK

Head of the Center for Civil Liberties, 2022 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

to the Kyiv Security Forum 

8 May 2025

My name is Oleksandra Matviichuk. I am a human rights lawyer and I'm documenting war crimes in this war which Russia has launched against Ukraine.

While this war turns people into numbers, we are returning people their names. Because people are not numbers. Life of each person matters.

All this hell which we now face in Ukraine is a result of total impunity which Russia enjoyed for decades, committing horrible crimes in Chechnya, Moldova, Georgia, Mali, Libya, Syria, other countries of the world. Russia has never been punished. Russia believes that they can do whatever they want.

We must break the circle of impunity. We must demonstrate justice. If we want to prevent wars in the future, we have to punish the states and their leaders who start such wars in present. It's common sense. But in the whole history of humankind, we have only one such a precedent. It was the Nuremberg Trial, where Nazi war criminals were tried only after the Nazi regime had collapsed.

But we are living in a new century. It means that justice shouldn't be dependent on how and when the war will end. We cannot wait. We must establish a special tribunal on aggression now and hold Putin, Lukashenko and top political leadership and high military command of the Russian state accountable. We have to do it not just for people in Ukraine.

We have to do it in order to prevent a next Russian attack on the next nation.