Search The Reckoning Project Archive

Three witness testimonies from the invasion of Ukraine. Hanna Tkachuk photographed in her dental office in Snihurivka, Ukraine after the city's liberation from Russian forces. (by Anna Tshyhyma) The following witness interviews from Ukraine were collected, transcribed and translated by The Reckoning Project (TRP), an organization of journalists and lawyers dedicated to compiling evidence for future war crimes prosecutions. Two dozen Ukrainian reporters make up the on-the-ground staff of The Reckoning Project. For the past year, they have been traveling throughout Ukraine to collect testimonies of kidnappings, murders and attacks on civilians, in the hope of creating a repository of evidence for future claims against Russia. The witness interviews “have to have enough details to reconstruct what really happened,” said Nataliya Gumenyuk, a Ukrainian journalist and founding member of TRP. The interviews her team conducts are designed to extract meticulous detail: “It’s very important to be able to re-create details beyond those necessary to a typical news article,” Gumenyuk explained. “What happened from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.? What were they wearing? Uniforms? What language did they speak? Did they have guns?” The hope is that these details will one day allow prosecutors “to re-create the scene before, during and after the alleged crime” and perhaps identify the perpetrators. Gumenyuk’s team does its best to collect testimonies shortly after the events in question take place. “There are people who want to tell the stories. But with time people don’t want to speak. The longer it takes from the crime, the less willing people are to [talk],” Gumenyuk explained. “I do think that journalists are the first responders. They are the first to arrive at the scene, they’re first to the talk to people. They arrive before human rights organizations or prosecutors.” Read the full story in The Dial here.

A Ukrainian father describes how he risked losing his children when they were taken to the Polyany center in Moscow after the evacuation of Mariupol The two young daughters of the family in Mariupol before the war (photo from the family archive). "Dad, the situation is such that they tell us that they will not take us back, they will give us to foster families or an orphanage, as long as the shelling in Donetsk lasts." These words will forever be etched in Yevhen's memory. A former soldier, the 39-year-old man was living and working in Mariupol at the Ilyich factory when the war broke out. His wife had left him and so he was raising their three children alone: an 8-year-old and a 6-year-old daughter and 13-year-old Matvii. February 24, 2022, the day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, found him there. The war in Mariupol After the first days of the war and in their attempt to protect themselves, they ended up as a family in a shelter where a total of 140 people lived. The water had already run out - three people were killed while fetching - and conditions had become desperately difficult when Yevhen heard his son say: "Dad, the army says we have to evacuate [the area]." When he went outside he saw a man who introduced himself as a soldier of the Russian Federation and told them that they wanted to take them to a safe place. They had half an hour to pack their things. Read the full story in Kathimerini here.

Christine Olsson /TT Peter Pomerantsev, himself born in the Soviet Union, has written two books about, among other things, Russian propaganda, troll factories and fake news. Now he is warning democratic forces to focus too much on the opposing side's disinformation instead of their own message. This week, the Swedish Academy organized a conference on the threats to freedom of expression. Among the international guests were, among others, the American historian Timothy Snyder and the Finnish-Estonian writer Sofi Oksanen - and then the British writer and journalist Peter Pomerantsev. His books have dealt with information warfare and propaganda, often with a focus on Russia. In an interview with Kulturnyheterna, he warns against putting too much emphasis on exposing disinformation and lies from non-democratic forces, instead of highlighting correct facts in a way that makes people want to listen. - The essence of malignant propaganda is to create identities that are violent, paranoid and aggressive. It can't be countered by just exposing it as a lie, because it goes so much deeper than that. "Wants to bring truth and justice together" Since it is difficult – perhaps even undesirable – to regulate the spread of misinformation in a democracy with freedom of expression, Peter Pomerantsev believes that one should instead compete with better communication. Watch/read the full segment at SVT here.

The Hague’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for the Russian leader reverberates far beyond Moscow and Ukraine. Getty Images This is not an April Fool’s joke. On April 1, Vladimir Putin’s hand-picked ambassador to the United Nations will take over as president of the UN Security Council. This is a position that rotates among the member states of the council. Ironically, Russia also held the same position in February 2022––the same month Putin gave the orders for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign country. That same Vladimir Putin is now wanted by The Hague. On March 17, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the Russian president and his henchwoman Maria Lvova-Belova, a key figure in an initiative to ship Ukrainian children to Russia. It’s hard to take that much hypocrisy in one go. The validity of the Russian Federation’s place on the Security Council is open to debate; there are many in diplomatic circles who believe the RF resides there illegally. But the federation bulldozed its way into its position on the council in December 1991, once the former Soviet Union—which had held a permanent seat as a result of the 1945 United Nations Charter—vaporized. Back then, there was no debate and no constitutional ruling. In this case, as in many, Russia got what Russia wanted. Still, the news from The Hague on St. Patrick’s Day was more than “an important moment”—the words of Piotr Hofmański, the International Criminal Court’s president. It was monumental. Read the full story in Vanity Fair here.

EPA/ALISA YAKUBOVYCH Serhii waited patiently in line until the supermarket opened in the city of Severodonetsk. It was March 2022 and already many food shops were closed. As in the remaining shops, the quantity of goods had decreased, residents were forced to queue several hours before they opened. Serhii, husband and father of a 13-year-old girl and journalist by profession, was in such a queue that day. Half an hour before the supermarket opened, 150 people had already gathered. It was 8.30 in the morning when he noticed a man taking pictures of the queue of people from different angles. Some began to protest, but he did not intervene, thinking it might be a fellow journalist. “But literally five to seven minutes after that, the bombing of that queue started. Then about three mines – I think they were mines – fell a few tens of meters from where [we were]. The queue of people began to move closer to the house, to the wall, and when I had already heard the whistle of this mine, I shouted: everyone down! I fell down myself, covered my head with my hands and the next thing I remember is opening my eyes and pieces of asphalt were on me." Read the full story in Kathimerini here.

Anadolu Agency/Getty Images/The Guardian During the first months of the Russian invasion, in one of the frontline villages in the southern Kherson region, I met several firefighters – ordinary Ukrainian men in their 40s or 50s. Their prewar tasks involved putting out fires in the local wood or occasionally buildings. Since the Russian invasion, they save houses burning from missiles and retrieve their dead neighbours. One of the men began to cry during our conversation. He left embarrassed, but shortly returned. I comforted the firefighters, explaining that even governors and mayors sometimes sob during interviews. In the following months, I travelled from one frontline town to another. I met doctors, policemen, railway and communal workers, journalists, electricians, civil servants, government officials whose relatives are fighting and dying in the army. They escaped or are still living under Russian occupation, their houses and apartments destroyed. They acknowledged that they were emotional, often angry, horrified, but driven by a sense of duty. In the end this would help them move forward, and even be proud of what they did. Read the full story in The Guardian here.

What the War in Ukraine Has Revealed About Effective Governance Ukrainian Presidential Press Service / Handout / Reuters / Foreign Affairs illustration In July 2021, seven months before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a group of researchers completed a major study of how Ukrainians viewed key events in their country’s recent history. The report, to which I contributed, yielded some striking findings. The first was that the population was not deeply divided over the country’s Soviet legacy or the 2014 Maidan revolution. Ukrainians of widely different backgrounds and regions, it turned out, shared a deep reservoir of common values and experiences on which they shaped their understanding of history. The second was that the country’s political institutions were generally held in low esteem. People across the board seemed to have a general lack of trust for the country’s leaders, no matter what party they came from, and they blamed many of Ukraine’s problems on its ruling class. In the year since the war began, it has become a common refrain among Western commentators that the conflict has served to unite, almost for the first time, a previously fragmented society. But as the 2021 study makes clear, that assumption is flawed. Drawing on their shared experiences of hardship and resilience over many years, Ukrainians from all parts of the country have not been surprised that the conflict has brought them closer together. What has been unexpected is how this immense struggle has transformed the state itself. Read the full story in Foreign Policy here.

Kharkiv city center after a Russian bombardment, March 22. (Rafael Yaghobzadeh/Rafael Yaghobzadeh/Libération) A year after the start of the war in Ukraine, Liberation gives the floor and the pen to the inhabitants and refugees of a bruised country, with Libé des Ukrainians. Find all the articles of this edition here, and the newspaper on newsstands, Monday, February 20. One year already that the Russians commit one of the worst international war crimes: the deportation of children, often torn from their parents. While the Ukrainian authorities search for a way to repatriate the civilians, the desperate parents try to get their children back to Russia on their own. But they face inordinate obstacles. Iryna, mother of Maksym (1), 15, traveled more than 10,000 kilometers to find her son, five months after their separation in October. She crossed three countries by bus, train and plane. Maksym studied at the Maritime College in Kherson, then still occupied by the Russians. One day he called his mother: "Mom, I'm on a boat, they're taking us to Crimea." The children were abruptly taken out of their classroom and taken from the right bank to the left bank of the river, in the region which is still today under Russian occupation. Read the full story in Libération here.

From Ukraine, a veteran war correspondent finds that the deprivations inflicted by Putin and his troops have actually strengthened the resolve of the country’s civilians. The World Health Organization says that, with the cold setting in across Ukraine, the conditions will increase the risk of hypothermia. This will also contribute to cases of pneumonia, heart attacks, strokes. The sick might not be able to reach health care facilities; an estimated 700 of them have been hit by Putin’s weapons—a similar tactic that he used in Syria to crush the resolve of the medical community, the humanitarian volunteers there, and the Syrian population. Ukraine is now Putin’s target, and by using missiles and drones to attack the electricity grids and heating structures, he and the Russian military seek to freeze Ukrainian civilians into submission or surrender. There’s not much chance of that. The Ukrainians have endured shocking deprivation before—Stalin attempted to starve them to death in the 1930s during the Holodomor—but there is a particularly gruesome kind of menace that comes with unending cold in a country where average temperatures in winter can drop well below zero. It is also debilitating for those who, despite war, are trying to live their lives with some kind of normalcy. Meeting a high-level government official in Kyiv earlier this month, my colleagues and I sat, in heavy blankets, in a darkened café lit by candles. We were discussing how to chronicle ongoing war crimes. And the irony did not escape us that as we spoke of atrocities, Putin was trying to freeze people to death by taking away their sources of heating, water, and light. It would have been comical had it not been so sad. Read the full story in Vanity Fair here.

Ukraine Is Where They Must Be Stopped Sheltering from Iranian kamikaze Shahed drones in the Kyiv metro in October, I tried to hide my extreme nervousness while simultaneously scrolling through social media videos of antiregime protests in Iran, where relentlessly courageous crowds of women were ripping off their shawls in defiance of the ayatollahs who sell the Shahed drones to the Kremlin, which then uses them to attack civilians in the city of my birth. It was a reminder of how the war in Ukraine is about fighting not only Russia, but also a whole network of authoritarian regimes. Vladimir Putin claims Russia’s invasion will usher in a new era of what he calls a “multi-polar” world, but which in practice means an era where the Russias, Chinas, and Irans of this world are increasingly free to strip away the last vestiges of human rights and humanitarian rules; where big states are ever more free to suffocate smaller ones in their “spheres of influence”; where the powerful can murder critics with impunity; where fossil-fuel dictatorships can hold the world ransom; where any hope of speaking truth to power is sunk under a deluge of disinformation; and the state can surveil your every digital footprint. But Putin miscalculated. Instead of strengthening his authoritarian network, the invasion of Ukraine can be a rallying point for democratic solidarity. As I sat in the Kyiv metro and sighed with relief at the boom of American and Norwegian air-defense systems taking out the Shahed drones, I found myself rooting on the Iranian protests even harder. Read the full story in Time here.

The other man? I may never know. It had only been three weeks since the invasion, but it felt as if the war had lasted a lifetime. We were exhausted and overwhelmed. By mid-March, the city of Kharkiv, situated 25 miles from the Russian border, looked unreachable from Kyiv, where I live. Ukrainians were adjusting to this new life. Under the constant shelling, hotels and shops were not able to offer any kind of normal service. We were not sure whether petrol stations were open. Yet the second-biggest city in Ukraine, where around 2 million people were living, was too important to stay away from. I had close friends who could host me. So I went. It was my friends who had said, in the early hours of the morning of 24 February, that “Kharkiv is being bombed”, confirming our worst fears. I had visited them in January, before the war, reporting on the mood in the city, and visited their newly bought apartment on the top floor of an old house in the centre. Kharkiv was the first place in Ukraine to have its city centre shelled. It was heartbreaking in March to see part of that street destroyed by rockets, though their house survived. I travelled from Kyiv with a photographer friend; we had worked together during the 2014 Maidan revolution. He later got a job at a major lifestyle magazine, but after the Russian invasion he returned to frontline work. The third person in our crew was a Polish TV correspondent whom I had met while reporting the aftermath of the siege of Aleppo in Syria in 2016. I have covered foreign conflicts before, but the fact that this one was taking place in my home country still makes me uncomfortable. Read the full story in the Guardian here.

Smoliyenko Dmytro/Ukrinform/Abac Earlier last month, I was sitting in a bomb shelter in Kyiv with dozens of civilians as we were pounded by missiles. Putin intended his bombs to do more than punish. He wanted them to destroy the power grids and heating facilities that keep Ukraine warm during the nation’s brutal winters. I direct a war crimes unit in Ukraine called The Reckoning Project. Our job is to gather human testimonies during wartime which we then verify, archive and build into cases for future war crimes tribunals. It matters to be on the right side of history — never more so than when it comes to the war in Ukraine. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the choice is exceptionally clear because the situation is exceptionally clear: Vladimir Putin is targeting civilians. He has attacked women and children trapped in train stations; apartment buildings filled with families; shopping malls, hospitals, schools. For once, most countries (and people) around the world have taken a strong and united stance against Putin. But in both politics and pop culture, dissenters abound. Loudest among them is former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, who — along with crafting some of rock’s most brilliant music — has backed not one, but two, murderous dictators: Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Read the full story in the New York Post here.