'Parents are forced to provide their children to Russian re-education camps in occupied territories and in different parts of Russia, for example, in Chechnya, where Ukrainian children wearing military uniform are taught to use weapons.'
Nobel Prize-winning human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk, who heads the Center for Civil Liberties in Kyiv, Ukraine, has documented 84,000 instances of war crimes -- abductions, rape, torture, forced deportations of children, bombing of hospitals, homes and schools, killing of children and civilians -- apart from the unspeakable horror of its concentration camps. And these, she says, are just the tip of the iceberg.
Russia, she says, is using pain as a tool of warfare to break people's resistance and occupy her country and is creating a 'Russian world' in Ukraine by eroding Ukrainian identity.
"They aren't just seeking territory," she says, and reveals the dystopian, bizarre and frightening reality that Ukrainians are going through as the war enters its fourth year.
"Occupation is not just a change of governance, it is enforced disappearances, torture, rapes, denial of your identity, forcible adoption of your own children, filtration camps and mass graves," Oleksandra tells Swarupa Dutt/Rediff.com in the second part of a must-read interview.
- Part I of the Interview: 'Putin is a liar'
You have described the war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine as 'different in their scale and brutality'. Please elaborate.
The Center for Civil Liberties was the first human rights group in the world to send mobile monitoring groups to Crimea and the Donbas region in 2014 to document war crimes, and continues to do so in areas where Russian troops are present.
These mobile groups document how Russians use terror as a war tactic against civilians in the occupied territories.
Russians exterminated ordinary people -- teachers, journalists, priests, environmentalists, musicians, children, writers -- people who are active in a community.
They banned the Ukrainian language and our culture and robbed and destroyed our heritage.
They took Ukrainian children to Russia, separating them from their families so as to bring them up as Russians.
This happened in the first years of the war, in 2014, and we sent numerous reports to all international organisations.
I spoke at the UN several times and at different hearings of UN committees but nothing changed.
When large-scale war started in 2022, the evil multiplied and became more intense.
We have documented 84,000 individual instances of Russian war crimes in Ukraine since 2022.
We are documenting how Russian troops deliberately hit residential buildings, schools, churches, museums and hospitals; how they attacked evacuation corridors; the inhuman conditions in prisons, child labour in OTs, how they tortured people and illegally deported Ukrainian children to Russia.
We have documented thousands of instances of abductions, robbery, rape and killing of civilians in the occupied territories in filtration camps.
(Filtration camps, also called concentration camps, are used by Russian forces in Ukraine to register, interrogate, and detain Ukrainian citizens in regions under Russian occupation before transferring them into Russia. This is part of forced population transfers).
Yet, the entire system that is the United Nations cannot stop them.
The main lessons we have learned from this is that Russia uses pain as a tool of war, which means that they are deliberately inflicting pain and suffering to civilians in order to break people's resistance and occupy this country.
Do you have figures for each and every of these war crimes you mentioned?
Yes, but when I mentioned the documentation of 84,000 war crimes, it's actually just the tip of the iceberg.
This is the documentation over the last three years only. We can't record each individual episode, so the real scale of horror is much, much larger.
You spoke about the mass abductions of Ukrainian children to Russia. Please explain.
A man lived in Mariupol with his three children, and when the city was occupied by Russian forces, he was forcibly taken to Russia. But instead of putting him in a filtration camp, he was imprisoned and therefore separated from his children. These three children were put in Russian re-education camps.
(A report funded by the US state department says that since 2022, children as young as four months living in the occupied areas have been taken to 43 re-education camps across Russia, including in Crimea and Siberia. At these camps they are given pro-Russia patriotic and military-related education.
In the first year of the war, over 6,000 children went to these camps, some never to return. Ukraine's government in 2025 claimed that more than 19,500 children had been deported to Russia, where some had been sexually exploited.)
At the camps, the children were told they are not Ukrainian; they are Russian, and that their father did not want them and they would be adopted by different Russian families.
I won't describe the horror and ill-treatment which the father experienced at the filtration camp, but by a miracle he was released.
One of his children at the re-education camp got a message through to his father saying that in five days Russian families would separate the siblings, adopt and transfer them to different parts of Russia.
Without documents or money, his body broken by the torture at the filtration camp, the father managed to find his children and get them back.
This happy ending is an exception.
The vast majority of children from the occupied territories are still in Russia, and the problem is when you have children as young as three or five year sold, the Russian adoptive family can easily change their identity by giving them a new name, a birth date and birth place, and after a while the children forget who they were.
When parents released after months or years in filtration camps are released and set about trying to find their abducted children, it's impossible to do so because young children have forgotten their real name, their real parents.
How many such cases of forced deportations and abductions of children have happened since 2022?
As a human rights organisation, we can't track each of these cases, but what we see is systematic practice and that is why the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children's Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova.
When I say that Vladimir Putin is the biggest child kidnapper in the world, it's not metaphorical; it is based on this legal indictment of the court.
We have the names of these 19,500 children and the names of their parents.
(Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in March 2025 has said that Russia's ombudsman in 2023, reported that Russia was holding 700,000 Ukrainian children).
The United Nations high commissioner for human rights has said that at least 669 children were killed and 1,800 injured in Ukraine from 2022 to December 31, 2024. Do your figures match?
UN representatives record cases for which they have access to proof.
They have no access to the occupied territories and that's why they don't know or even understand the real scope of death which Ukrainians are facing because information from the occupied territories is blocked by Russians and evidence of deaths destroyed.
[For clarity, Russia occupies 20 per cent of Ukraine and millions of Ukrainians live in occupied territories like Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk and the Luhansk regions. However, Russia controls only 70 per cent of these occupied territories.]
Let me explain this with the story of Ilya Matvienko, a10-year-old-boy from Mariupol.
When Russians seized the city, they didn't allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to open a green corridor for evacuation of civilians.
So Ilya and his mother, like thousands of other people in Mariupol, had to hide in the basement of their building from Russian shelling.
They melted snow for water and used firewood to cook whatever food they had.
But supplies ran out and they were forced to go out on to the streets where they were caught in the middle of Russian shelling.
Ilya's mother was hit in the head and the boy's legs were shred by shrapnel. His mother somehow managed to drag her son to a friend's apartment.
There was no medical assistance at any hospital because Russians had deliberately destroyed the entire medical infrastructure in Mariupol including a maternity hospital.
It was winter and the mother and son lay on a couch hugging each other for warmth.
Ilya told my colleague that he could feel his mother's heartbeat stop and she died in his arms.
This unimaginable horror is what Russians bring to the life of Ukrainian children.
Every child who is dead or was injured because of the Russian war is a case, not a number.
After the occupation of Mariupol, Russians didn't allow international organisations or independent media to work there.
They began reconstruction of the bombed city quickly to hide from history the excesses and murders they had committed.
These horrific cases -- are they only from the occupied territories?
Yes. We have approximately 1.6 million children in the occupied territories where Russia is conducting an unbelievable experiment, as we speak, to prepare the next generation of Putin's soldiers.
Russia is building a Soviet Union in the occupied territories. They are closed, dysfunctional worlds where fear rules and people face severe repression, erasure of local identity, and systematic destruction of culture and infrastructure. Russians are creating a 'Russian world' in our country.
Erosion of identity means that Ukrainians in these OTs are prohibited to speak Ukrainian and can be severely punished.
Russian textbooks replace Ukrainian ones in school -- all Ukrainians books were burned.
Libraries are purged of Ukrainian books. Russians are not just seeking territory; they are trying to destroy our identity.
Children in OTs go through rigorous militarisation which begins in kindergarten.
Parents are forced to provide their children to Russian re-education camps in occupied territories and in different parts of Russia, for example, in Chechnya, where Ukrainian children wearing military uniform are taught to use weapons.
Russians raise their children in unquestionable obedience and that is what is being done in the OTs.
When these children turn 14, they will receive a Russian passport, and at 18 the boys are conscripted in the Russian army.
They are reprogramming Ukrainian children using an authoritarian software which when the time is right, will be used against us.
Every human being needs space -- mental spaces – but there is no concept of personal space for Russians.
I want to say that if this war is about land, then give the land to Russia, give them the territories and give us our people back.
Occupation is not just a change of governance from one State to another.
It is enforced disappearances, torture, rapes, denial of your identity, forcible adoption of your own children, filtration camps and mass graves.
Over 3 million Ukrainians live in occupied territories. We have no moral right to leave them battling torture and the death of their loved ones.
These are our families, our relatives, our communities, our people and we will get them back.
How do the abductions of civilians happen?
Let me tell you the story of Stephan Podolchak. He was a priest in a village in Kalanchak (in Kherson oblast or province) under Russian occupation.
Russians came to his house and picked up Father Stephan -- barefoot with a bag over his head.
They upturned and destroyed everything in his house. Two days later they told his wife that Father Stephan had died of a heart attack.
We know the Russians tortured him to death because they had repeatedly told him earlier to transfer his church and its congregation to the Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarch.
Father Stephan had refused insisting that he would not betray his oath to his congregation. So, he was picked up and killed.
The famous Ukrainian musician and conductor, Yuriy Kerpatenko, was shot dead by Russian soldiers because the Russians asked him to play in a concert, and he refused.
[According to the culture ministry in Kyiv, 'Conductor Yuriy Kerpatenko declined to take part in a concert intended by the occupiers to demonstrate the so-called 'improvement of peaceful life' in Kherson.']
We have documentation of at least 61,000 people who have gone missing since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, who include both soldiers and civilians.
When soldiers are abducted or go missing in action there is at least some chance they might return home in a prisoner-of-war swap, but civilians simply disappear because they are killed as Russians don't admit to taking them in the first place.
IMAGE: Oleksandra Matviichuk.
Photograph: Kind courtesy Oleksandra Matviichuk
How are orphans coping? Is there a government body which looks after them?
We have a lot of problems with rehabilitation, medical, assistance, psychological care and providing them security.
Our government bodies are not very efficient, frankly speaking, and that's why a lot of civil society initiatives are on.
The Voice of Ukraine Foundation, run by my friend, for instance, provides medical and psychological support for children who are affected by the war, or those raped by Russian soldiers, or illegally deported to Russia.
If you ask me why the Russians do not leave children alone, it's because they are inherently cruel.
These civil society organisations do help, but the problem is with the numbers.
Millions of people are suffering -- children, men, women even those far away from the frontline. It is difficult to live among such horror every day.
It is impossible to counsel the millions who have been affected. We have to find another way to transfer this pain into energy which enables people survive.
I think that Ukrainians have much more resilience than we give ourselves credit for.
Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com
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