Russia tried to bury these war crimes — this play dares to expose them

Times

2 days ago

The murderous Macbeth gets his comeuppance in the end. Medea kills her own children — tragic for them, catharsis for us. But can a play help to hold real evil accountable?
Take Russia's war crimes against Ukraine. This year the US administration abolished the Russian war crimes investigations unit at the State Department, a serious blow to the pursuit of justice. If there's one reason to value Anastasiia Kosodii and Josephine Burton's new documentary play, The Reckoning, based on war crimes testimonies in Ukraine, it's as a particularly moving way to keep Russia's crimes in the public mind. But this play is so much more than that.
Since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine I have been working with a team of journalists and lawyers to catalogue, publicise and build legal cases of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine. Our aim is to combine the power of law and media to achieve justice much quicker than usually happens in wars. When you think about Nuremberg, the justice process for the Yugoslav wars or Rwanda, the accountability came long after the war finished. We want to start now. We call ourselves the Reckoning Project, and we have provided Kosodii and Burton with the materials for their play, which is running at the Arcola Theatre in Dalston, east London.
The first phase of our work is built on the careful, often agonisingly detailed collection of witness testimonies by a specially trained team of Ukrainian reporters on the ground. We have collected more than 600 testimonies so far, cataloguing torture; sexual crimes; the bombardment of hospitals, schools and apartment blocks; deportations; the mass abduction of children; enforced disappearances; enforced indoctrination; and extrajudicial executions.
This collection already marks a sea change. War testimonies are usually collected well after the crimes have been committed, and it is so difficult to reconstruct the truth years later. Janine di Giovanni, the Reckoning's chief executive, is a former war reporter for The Times and an international justice expert who has covered three genocides, starting from the wars in Yugoslavia, and frequently found that though she had been first on the scene of crimes, the way she recorded and preserved evidence made it inadmissible in court. Our first aim at the Reckoning Project is to make sure that journalists who come to a crime scene collect evidence that will be admissible, and will thus hasten justice.
After the testimonies have been collected, they are analysed by lawyers and archivists in Berlin and London. They map the gruesome patterns, the repeat violations that show what we are witnessing are not one-off incidents but part of a larger Russian strategy. The lawyers build cases in courts of law, provide evidence to the Hague, create submissions to the United Nations and other international treaty bodies. Our journalists, meanwhile, create stories based on the archive. By putting journalists and lawyers together we expand the scope of justice to include both courts of law and the court of public opinion. We want to make the vague words about 'truth and justice' holding the powerful accountable tangible and impactful.
When we first shared testimonies with Kosodii and Burton, I wondered how they would bring them to life. The testimonies are very detailed, but they show little emotion. The central testimony the play focuses on is about a janitor at a country house in the Kyiv region, near Bucha, who was looking after an estate when the Russian occupiers arrived. In the 70-odd pages of testimony the facts drip out slowly, each detail more harrowing than the last. The occupiers took over the house the janitor was looking after, then used it as a shooting range to murder civilians fleeing the advancing Russian forces by car. A whole column of cars was shot up. The janitor was tied up, then released, and left alone wandering the cemetery of bullet-shredded cars and corpses.
• How can drama portray Russia?
As the dramatists explained to me, the emotion in the testimony is less in any explicit language the janitor uses than in the way he speaks with the Reckoning reporter taking the testimony. Their conversation lasted on and off for many months. The janitor first didn't fully trust the reporter, then slowly opened up. The pivotal moment came when he told her about how he had tried to save a man hiding from the remaining Russian soldiers in another house. The man had refused his help, was caught and killed. The sense of guilt for not doing more to help the victim was weighing the janitor down. When he could finally talk it through, he opened up. At the same time the reporter has a reckoning of her own, for the first time coming to terms with her feelings of remorse for how she struggled to get her mother out of an occupied town when she was somewhere safe.
So this is a story, and a drama, about how human connection, trust and empathy are essential for the truth to emerge. Part of the aim of Putin's invasion is to make the people of Ukraine so terrified that they will be too scared and ashamed to tell the horrifying truth of what they have been part of. What is striking in The Reckoning is how both the janitor and the reporter blame themselves for not moving faster to save other victims, as if their suffering is somehow the janitor's or the reporter's fault.
Battling the sense of misplaced shame and repressed memory is all too common in other contexts — not least the Holocaust, which so many survivors were unwilling to talk about. And it has taken nearly a century for Ukraine to find a public expression — in the form of books, musicals, monuments and exhibits — for the many millions murdered by the Stalin regime to suppress Ukrainian independence.
And in that sense this play is part of a greater journey to justice, where the traumas of the war are processed so that society can come to terms with, or at least to common grief for, what has been done to them — and name the guilty.
The Reckoning is at the Arcola Theatre, London, to Jun 28,