On the trail of Russian war crimes

KYIV, Ukraine – When Lyudmyla Denisova became Ukraine’s human rights commissioner four years ago, a job she thought would complete a career in public service, it rekindled a youthful ambition. “I really wanted to be a prosecutor,” she said.

Not knowing the horrors to come, she could hardly imagine how well life had prepared her to be able to meet this moment, with the brains of a lawyer, the enthusiasm of a prosecutor. , a politician’s communication and organizational skills, and an insight into Russia’s activism. .

She’s been overworked since the Russian military invasion in February, identifying, documenting, and evidencing human rights abuses. Along with police and prosecutors, she interviews prisoners and tracks missing people, and mobilizes teams across the country to coordinate support for victims of war.

“I myself was in Bucha and witnessed everything with his own eyes,She spoke of the suburbs of Kyiv, where she said 360 extrajudicial killings were recorded. “I have seen all of these graves myself. It’s scary when you find a pair of Size 33 sneakers there” – the size of a kid in Ukraine.

On the meeting table, she spreads out her daily report and reads out several cases that have come to her office in the last 24 hours. They include the separate cases of a 45-year-old man and an 11-year-old girl who both committed suicide after being sexually assaulted by Russian soldiers on the street and blaming themselves for what happened. , she said.

“Even if a person dies in a bombing, this is a war crime,” she said in one of two recent interviews. “The fact that the Russian Federation invaded and started bombing is already an aggressive war crime.”

She is also monitoring reports of sexual violence and gang rape by Russian soldiers, as well as the fate of 400 Ukrainians, including children, who she says have been sent to a camp in Ukraine. Penza, central Russia. And she is pushing to bring genocide charges against Russia’s leaders.

A lawyer by training, she served as a member of Parliament and a cabinet minister, before assuming her current post. But it wasn’t just her career experience that helped prepare her for her wartime role; Her personal history gives her insight into the repression, exile, and annexation at the whim of the Kremlin.

Denisova, 61, was born in the Russian Far North, in the city of Arkhangelsk, near the Arctic Circle. She said her great-grandparents were shot and her grandparents were stripped of their homes and lands under Stalin in 1929.

She initially trained as a kindergarten teacher, but later had the opportunity to study law at Leningrad State University, now the University of St.Petersburg. She noted that Vladimir V. Putin had studied before her in the same prestigious law faculty, but she spoke grudgingly about both his academic achievements and his recruitment by the Soviet spy agency, the KGB.

Denisova speculates, like others, that Putin was admitted to the prestigious law school through connections, which suggests he had ties to the KGB, where he was known by the code name “Moth”.

“One who has nothing to say except like a moth,” she said. “What a strange creature.”

She took it as a point of pride that she was never a member of the Communist Party. “We don’t have a single communist in our family,” she said.

After graduation, she went to work at the Arkhangelsk regional court, handling cases of families that had suffered from Soviet oppression and in the 1980s, was allowed to register for rehabilitation. They returned from exile in the country and took back the positions of hired laborers.

In 1989, she was appointed prosecutor but declined the post to move to Crimea in Ukraine after her husband, Oleksandr Denisov, then an investigator for Soviet military prosecutors, was posted in there.

When Ukraine gained independence with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, they continued and became Ukrainian citizens. The pair have since split but remain good friends, she said, close to their two daughters and four grandchildren.

She then entered public life, leading the regional economic and financial department in Crimea at the turn of the millennium, and also briefly worked in the private sector.

In 2006, she won election to the Ukrainian Parliament and later served as minister of labor and social policy. In 2014, she became a founding member with Arseniy Yatsenyuk, then prime minister of a conservative nationalist political party, the People’s Front. She describes herself as a “Ukrainian nationalist of Russian descent.”

In 2018, the Ukrainian Parliament appointed her to head the Commission on Human Rights, established nearly 25 years ago, where she took over a group of human rights lawyers and constitutional experts. When the war started, her office worked with the European Parliament and the United Nations, and now it sends daily reports to International Criminal Court officials, she said.

The cooperation with the court represents the first serious attempt to prepare a war crimes case against Mr. Putin. “There are two ways,” she said, to do this. “One is through a criminal process to prove the guilt of these service members and convict them according to our law, and the second is to do it under international law.”

Denisova has set up a hotline for citizens to report human rights abuses as well as requests for help at the scene. The phone operators, some in the basement of her office in Kyiv, others working remotely across the country, taking calls in shifts, working 24/7.

Non-stop requests. During a brief, recent visit to the basement office in Kyiv, executives answered repeated calls. Much, more than 15,000 people during the first six weeks of the war, was for the missing, but there were also requests for humanitarian aid and safe passages out of besieged cities.

Thousands of other calls were made for psychological help. Those callers were directed to a team of professional psychologists, led by Denisova’s daughter, Oleksandra Kvitko, a trained psychologist who volunteered to set up the service.

Information from callers was entered into a database that Denisova shared with government officials and prosecutors. It has thus become an invaluable first warning system for serious human rights abuses occurring in the cities attacked, as well as in towns and villages occupied by the Russian military. close.

The psychologists taking the call were nearing burnout, she said, adding that she was looking for funding to expand the team. “We all dealt with a soldier who wanted to commit suicide after he witnessed what happened in Bucha and felt guilty,” she recounts. “And how many people didn’t call and didn’t ask for help?”

Denisova has become one of the leading voices on Ukraine’s suffering and outrage, appearing regularly in the news and generating a large number of social media posts.

She said that she certainly has enough grounds to accuse the Russian leaders not only of crimes against humanity but also of genocide.

Two things convinced her: the extent and circumstances of the sexual violence, which she said was used as a weapon against Ukrainian women, and even described by the perpetrators themselves as so; and forcibly bringing children from Ukraine to Russia.

“We are arguing for this to be recognized as genocide,” she said. “This is when the people of a country are slaughtered, destroyed. Or used for this purpose, including sexual violence”.

She detailed cases of gang rape and repeated assaults on imprisoned women that left them both injured and pregnant. A woman trying to stop Russian soldiers from attacking her sister says they told her: “Look, it’s going to be like this with all the Nazi prostitutes.” Russia claims that it is launching a military offensive in Ukraine to wipe out Nazi Germany.

Denisova said: “They raped them until they were unable to have children, or give birth to their own children. “This shows that they want to destroy the Ukrainian nation. And when they kill children, it also means they don’t want our nation in this world.”

Oleksandr Chubko contribution report from Kyiv.