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The Guardian
01-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Release of Ukrainian prisoners in Russia key to any peace deal, rights groups say
Ukrainian and Russian civil society leaders have called for the unconditional release of thousands of Ukrainian civilians being held in Russian captivity, pushing for world leaders to make it a central part of any peace deal. Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Kyiv-based Centre for Civil Liberties, which won the 2022 Nobel peace prize, said most of the discussion on ending the conflict, led by Donald Trump's administration, focused solely on territories and potential security guarantees. 'It's a huge problem that we lose the human dimension in this political process. Only with solving the human dimension can we find a path to sustainable peace,' she said. On Tuesday, the Guardian and its reporting partners launched the Viktoriia project, an investigation into the death of the Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna in Russian custody, as well as a report on the systemic torture and mistreatment of thousands of civilian detainees seized by Russian occupying forces. The European Commission on Wednesday condemned the killing, with its spokesperson Anitta Hipper saying it showed life under occupation 'remains a constant threat to Ukrainians'. Jan Braathu, the media freedom representative for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, said he was 'appalled' by the evidence emerging in Roshchyna's case. A preliminary autopsy suggests she was tortured before she died, and her brain and other body parts were removed in order to conceal the cause of death. In a statement, Braathu said her treatment was a breach of international law, including the Geneva conventions and the UN conventions against torture – to which Russia is a signatory. 'I condemn these grave abuses by the Russian Federation,' he said. The Ukrainian parliament's commissioner for human rights, Dmytro Lubinets, said that as of April 2024 the number of people registered as having disappeared stood at 16,000, but that calculating an exact total was impossible. Those detained are often socially and politically active people Russia fears may resist occupation, as well as former military personnel or Ukrainian government officials. Some are simply in the wrong place in the wrong time and are pulled into a nightmare of torture and mistreatment. Prisoners are often held incommunicado, without charge or access to legal support, and are not allowed to send and receive letters. Their fate is one of the lesser-reported aspects of Russia's war on Ukraine. The Guardian and its reporting partners, in a collaboration led by the French newsroom Forbidden Stories, have gathered testimonies from former detainees at one of the most notorious holding facilities, Taganrog pre-trial detention facility No 2. They show civilians and prisoners of war are being subjected to severe food rationing, with little or no medical care, and that torture including electric shocks, physical and sexual violence and waterboarding is meted out by Russian guards. 'When you hear about the conditions and the torture, there is a clear understanding that some of these people have no chance to be alive by the time the political process has ended,' said Matviichuk. Trump met the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on the sidelines of the pope's funeral in Rome on Saturday, while his envoy, Steve Witkoff, met Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Friday. Trump claimed Russia and Ukraine were 'very close to a deal' and has said he wants the two sides to meet soon. A draft of the supposed US peace plan, published last week by Reuters, covers territory, economic issues and security guarantees, but says nothing about prisoners. Karyna Malakhova-Diachuk, the co-founder of an organisation that brings together the families of civilian detainees, said she was hoping that the freeing of these prisoners would come before a deal on territories and other elements that the US wants to nail down on the way to a lasting peace. 'First, there should be an agreement to bring all the people home, and only after that they should start other negotiations. Otherwise everything will stay frozen on this issue,' she said. During the first year of the war, civilians were frequently included in prisoner exchanges between Russia and Ukraine but it is now rare. Malakhova-Diachuk's organisation comprises relatives of 380 detainees, and she said there had been no releases for more than a year of those linked to the group. The emotional toll on relatives was hard to express, she said, adding that the horror stories to emerge from Russian prisons made the waiting and uncertainty all the more painful. 'You see the PoWs return and they tell these horrific stories of torture and injuries and the things that happen there and there is just nothing you can do.' A minority have been charged and given long prison terms for 'terrorism' and other crimes, which could present further obstacles if Russia claims they are convicted criminals and so cannot be part of a deal. Mykhailo Podolyak, a Zelenskyy aide, said that civilian detainees, along with prisoners of war and the Ukrainian children forcibly taken to Russia, would be a key part of Ukraine's demands in any peace deal. He added that even those who had been given prison terms in Russia should be freed as part of a peace deal. 'These courts have no legal weight for us. We don't consider these people to be convicted of anything. And we will do everything for our citizens to be returned to Ukraine,' he said. The human dimension has been absent from most of the western countries' public messaging around the push for a peace deal, with the focus instead on territories and security guarantees. 'We've heard nothing at all from Trump. We are knocking on different doors of different governments,' said Oleg Orlov, head of the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, which was also awarded the 2022 Nobel peace prize. Memorial and the Centre for Civil Liberties are two of about 50 Ukrainian and Russian organisations that have created a campaign called People First, which calls for the freeing of all prisoners of war, civilian detainees and Ukrainian children taken to Russia, at an early stage in the peace process. While the all-for-all exchange of prisoners of war is a normal part of the end of military hostilities, the mechanism to free civilians is less clear. 'Russia should let them go without any conditions, but it will be very hard to achieve this,' said Orlov. He said one solution could be for Ukraine to free citizens it had arrested on charges of collaboration with Russian occupying forces and offer them passage to Russia. 'You can't swap civilians, but there could be a possibility of a simultaneous freeing of these people with detained Ukrainian civilians,' he said.
Sunday Post
27-04-2025
- Politics
- Sunday Post
'Giving Putin Crimea in peace talks will open a path to hell'
Get a weekly round-up of stories from The Sunday Post: Thank you for signing up to our Sunday Post newsletter. Something went wrong - please try again later. Sign Up A leading Ukrainian human rights lawyer has warned handing over Crimea to Vladimir Putin would 'open a path to hell' and lead to a world of further wars and great violence. Oleksandra Matviichuk, who is head of the non-profit Centre for Civil Liberties, warned Russia must not be allowed to walk away with fresh territory and no security guarantees after unleashing horror on Ukraine. She believes such a failure to rein in the Kremlin would see Putin and rogue leaders around the world emboldened to launch new wars and snatch up neighbouring land. It comes as peace talks between Russian and Ukraine reach a key stage, with US president Donald Trump calling on leaders to meet for 'very high level talks' and insisting they are close to ending the bloody three-year war. Trump said in an interview earlier this week that Crimea – a strategic peninsula along the Black Sea in southern Ukraine – 'will stay with Russia'. It was seized by Russia in 2014, years before the full-scale invasion that began in 2022. Matviichuk said the current conflict is the result of Russia being allowed to act with 'total impunity for decades' and warned if Putin is rewarded for the invasion, he will go further. © Vladimir Sindeyeve/NurPhoto/Shut She said: 'For now, Ukraine has no military potential to release the people in Crimea and restore territorial integrity. It would be very difficult to achieve this goal by military force. 'But it's not just a problem of the constitution of Ukraine that means no Ukrainian president can agree to legitimise the occupation of Crimea. 'It's even more of a problem for international law. If Russia achieves its goal of getting legitimisation of its occupation by force, it ruins the international order that has been in place since the second world war. 'It will open a path to hell because there are, in different parts of the globe, other leaders who want to change the state borders and rewrite the principle of state sovereignty for their neighbours. 'The last time the world violated these international principles, it led to the second world war. When you live in a world without such rules, it's always a world of wars and great violence.' Matviichuk won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in 2022, eight years after demanding help for Ukraine from then US president Joe Biden as he visited her country. She wants greater focus on what will happen to the millions of Ukrainians currently living under Russian occupation and the tens of thousands of children who have been taken from their homes and handed to Russian families. The human rights leader said she has personally interviewed hundreds of people who have been kept in Russian captivity and heard how they were beaten, tortured and raped. But Matviichuk believes even now, Russia does not really care about making a deal. She said: 'Putin did not start this large-scale war because he wants to occupy a small part of Ukrainian land. 'He started this war because he wants to achieve his geopolitical goals. His logic is historical. He dreams about his legacy. 'He wants to occupy and destroy the whole country and then go further. He wants to forcibly restore the Russian empire. 'We have to accept that without security guarantees, there will always be a threat and there will be no sustainable peace.' Presidents met for 15 minutes The presidents met at St Peter's Basilica for about 15 minutes and agreed to continue negotiations later in the day, Ukrainian presidential spokesman Serhii Nykyforov said. White House communications director Steven Cheung said they 'had a very productive discussion'. It came as three people were killed overnight by Russian attacks across Ukraine. Two people died in a strike on the town of Yarova in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region, local governor Vadym Filashkin said in a post on social media. Another person died in the Dnipropetrovsk region, said governor Serhiy Lysak. Six people were injured, including an 88-year-old woman and an 11-year-old girl, he said.
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Nobel laureates urge frozen Russian funds to be used for Ukraine
Frozen Russian assets should be used for the reconstruction of Ukraine and compensation to the victims of the war following a peace agreement, according to an appeal signed by more than 130 Nobel laureates. The signatories include Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, Polish activist Lech Wałęsa, authors Elfriede Jelinek, Herta Müller and Orhan Pamuk, physicists Reinhard Genzel, Ferenc Krausz and Roger Penrose, chemists Michael Levitt and Gerhard Ertl, biologist Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and economist Edmund S Phelps. The petition is to be handed over soon to Oleksandra Matviichuk, who heads Ukraine's Centre for Civil Liberties, which was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. The petition notes that Russian central bank assets totalling around €300 billion ($3.25 billion) are currently frozen as a result of sanctions imposed in response to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The funds are held in bank accounts in the countries of the G7 and the European Union and are generating interest. "We, the Nobel Laureates who have signed this appeal, call on these governments to release these funds from the Russian Central Bank to finance the reconstruction of Ukraine and compensation of war victims so that the country can be rapidly rebuilt after a peace agreement is reached," the petition says. New laws might be needed, but this was necessary "given the undeniable emergency and gross violations of international law," it says. In July last year, the EU released €1.5 billion in interest from the Russian assets to pay for armaments for Ukraine. According to the EU Commission, some €210 billion is currently frozen in the EU. Making use of the funds would require a dispossession order.
