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As I report on the aftermath of Russian occupation, there is a new sense that what once seemed impossible can be achieved At Liberty Square in Kherson, residents gather, trying to find wifi near the temporary wireless internet towers and charging points. There is limited phone connection and no internet to read the news and find out what is going on outside this recently liberated region. During their withdrawal after nine months of occupation, Russian forces blew up the TV tower and the power grid, so there is no electricity to charge devices either. Yet the mood is celebratory in the square today, as locals wave Ukrainian flags and banners marking the liberation. It has been seven days since Ukrainian troops re-entered the city, but Ukrainian soldiers, police, social services, foreign reporters and anyone who has arrived from outside the city are still greeted warmly. “I am so happy to be at home,” says one woman. “Home? Are you not from Kherson?” I ask. “At home means in Ukraine,” she says, and hugs me. Sasha, 13, has come with her father, Viktor, to charge their phones. She has spent the last few days with her classmates from school waving at the military cars passing by. I am struck by her definition of freedom: “When the Russians were here, we had to walk with our heads down, not looking in front of us,” she says. “Now we are back in Ukraine we can raise our heads up and feel we’re free.” Her father nods. Read the full story in the Guardian here.

Троє дітей пережили блокаду Маріуполя, примусове переселення, ув’язнення батька та власне заслання – до Росії. Оригінал матеріалу було опубліковано в американському часописі The Vanity Fair. Українською історію опублікувала "Українська правда. Життя". Кругла жовта медаль за третє місце у змаганнях з греко-римської боротьби – це чи не єдина річ, яку вдалося вивезти з Маріуполя Євгену Межевому. Його 12-річний син Матвій виграв її у попередньому періоді життя, їхнього життя до війни. Після того, як його звільнили з колонії в Оленівці після тривалої фільтрації, 39-річний Євген повністю зосередився на житті та безпеці своїх трьох дітей. Їхня історія – одна з багатьох оповідей про роз'єднання сім’ї, втрату, травму, а в їхньому випадку – переїзд до іншої країни. Читайте повну версію матеріалу за посиланням.

Ukrainians are preparing for the worst Getty/The National News The lights are going out all over Ukraine as the war rages on, targeting civilian infrastructure. A bitter winter is descending on a courageous country, and millions of residents are preparing for the cold and the dark. This weekend, Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, warned that water, electricity and heat may be broken down entirely. “Let's be frank," Mr Klitschko said. “Our enemies are doing everything for the city to be without heat, without electricity, without water supply, in general, so we all die." The Ukrainians are preparing for the worst even while their enemies are doing everything possible to make this a miserable winter. But they may have underestimated how resilient Ukrainians can be. They held back the Russians from the gates of their capital. They made it through a summer of intense warfare in the south and the east. Their country has been violated but they remain committed to complete territorial integrity. Despite US President Joe Biden’s private requests for negotiations with the Russians – surely a way of propping up his own midterm election battle – Ukrainians are determined to get the total return of their country. But wars in winter, even for Russians who fought in the depths of the winter in Chechnya and the mountains of Afghanistan, are notoriously difficult to fight, and harder for civilians to endure. Those who can flee will, but those who cannot – the disabled, the poor, the elderly – will literally freeze. Read the full story in The National News here.

How this year’s Lviv Book Forum in Ukraine became an act of solidarity. LVIV, Ukraine—One of the most profound images to come from the siege of Sarajevo was the stark image of the cellist Vedran Smailovic playing Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor every day at noon, sitting elegantly and defiantly in black tie in the midst of the wreckage of Bosnia’s National and University Library. The library had been bombed by Bosnian Serbs on Aug. 25, 1992, destroying 90 percent of its 1.5 million volumes of precious books, including rare Ottoman editions. A 32-year-old librarian was killed that night as she desperately tried to save books. The scene of book pages burning and ashes rising in the air was an indelible image of the cruelty of war and a symbol of cultural destruction. The beautiful, Moorish-inspired City Hall building, called Vijecnica, which housed the library, was more than a place to find books—it was a potent symbol of multicultural ethnicity. That, above all, is what the Serbs tried to destroy: the cultural ethos of what made up Bosnia. A similar phenomenon is happening now in Ukraine. Russia seeks to destroy Ukrainian identity, and that includes monuments, libraries, theaters, art, and literature. Read the full story in Time here.

As cases of war crimes pile up against Russia, can peddlers of hate be held to account? For years, and especially since the invasion of 24 February, Russian state media has been calling to wipe Ukraine off the map, for killing Ukrainians en masse, and dehumanising its people, smearing them as “Nazis” who need to be “denazified”. As the cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression and genocide pile up against the Russian leadership and military, is there a way to hold members of the propaganda machine accountable as well? Are they protected by freedom of speech or is their role qualitatively different: not mere trumpeters of abhorrent opinion but facilitators of crimes? And what does it mean for other cases across the world: from Donald Trump using Twitter to (allegedly) egg on the rioters at the US Capitol on 6 January, to the Myanmar online peddlers of hate encouraging persecution of the Rohingya? Read the full story in the Guardian here.

Roman Hrytsyna/AP First of all, it’s scary to be bombarded. For five hours and 37 minutes dozens of rockets launched from the Caspian and Black seas hit Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, where I live and work. Each of them could destroy your house. As a reporter travelling in the areas most affected by the war, I’ve seen the horrific damage these strikes can cause. Just one hit can destroy a multi-storey apartment building, leaving a burnt skeleton – over the weekend an attack like this in Zaporizhzhia took at least 13 lives. Today Ukrainians experienced one of the largest air attacks since the start of the Russian invasion. For the first time, missile strikes hit the very centre of the Ukrainian capital, where at least five people were killed, and dozens wounded. These were mainly commuters going to work on Monday morning. Five more airstrikes followed. Read the full story in The Guardian here.

During an international symposium, we discussed testimony collection during the war in Ukraine and how it can lay the foundations of transitional justice processes. A DESTROYED SCHOOL IN CHERNIHIV, UKRAINE | PHOTO © SHUTTERSTOCK / DROP OF LIGHT If Syria was the first war where thousands of civilians and others took footage of violence and destruction with their smartphones, Ukraine is probably the first where evidence of war crimes is being gathered even while the war still rages. A number of highly professional, independent, civil society-led initiatives have been launched to collect legally admissible testimony. While an extremely welcome development, this inevitably also gives rise to concerns over duplication and possibly marring evidence for national and international judicial bodies. Improving testimony collection To promote greater mutual understanding and cooperation among those involved, the Berghof Foundation hosted a one-day hybrid symposium on 14 September in collaboration with the recently-established and already applauded The Reckoning Project: Ukraine Testifies to exchange best practices and discuss the role testimony collection plays in broader transitional justice efforts in Ukraine. The symposium started with a closed-door practitioners’ exchange on current efforts and best practices in the field of testimony collection. In the afternoon, the discussion was opened for an international audience to discuss the findings of the practitioners’ exchange as well as broader questions regarding transitional justice in Ukraine. Speakers included Janine di Giovanni and Nataliya Gumenyuk of The Reckoning Project, Ambassador Anton Korynevych of the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Beth Van Schaack (Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice at the US State Department), Prince Zeid bin Ra’ad (CEO of the International Peace Institute and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights), Pablo de Greiff of the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, Lise Grande (President of the United States Institute for Peace), international legal expert Philippe Sands as well as the head of the Berghof Foundation’s Global Learning Hub for Transitional Justice and Reconciliation, Natascha Zupan. The documentation of war crimes has reached an unprecedented level in Ukraine. The sheer volume of reported and documented cases constitutes a considerable challenge for legal practitioners and activists. It is becoming evident that not all cases can be brought to court in a timely manner. This requires a skillful definition of legal strategies as well as a careful management of expectations. Read the full story at the Berghof Foundation's website here.

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST: Investigators appointed by the U.N. have confirmed that Russian armed forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine. They have documented civilian executions, torture and sexual violence. Another group in a unique position to track atrocities in Ukraine is journalists. The Reckoning Project exists to train journalists to collect not just their stories but also evidence of war crimes that can be used in international court. One of its creators is a longtime war correspondent, Janine di Giovanni, and she joins us now. Jeanine, thank you for being here. JEANINE DI GIOVANNI: Thank you so much for having me. SUMMERS: So, Jeanine, I'm wondering if you could just start by telling us what motivated you to start The Reckoning Project. DI GIOVANNI: Well, it was really motivated out of deep frustration and sorrow. I'd been reporting war for more than 30 years and witnessing three genocides, essentially - Bosnia, Rwanda and the slaughter of the Yazidis. Now, I had done something like The Reckoning Project in Iraq, Yemen and Syria for the United Nations. But The Reckoning Project is far more advanced. And we are working with Ukrainian investigative journalists. We've trained them so that their work will adhere to international legal standards. And then we're building cases. SUMMERS: Can you just walk us through what is different about covering war crimes as a journalist and, say, the types of documentation and evidence that's done by a legal investigator? DI GIOVANNI: There really is a lot that is very different. Some of the really important things - first of all, you cannot interview a witness who's been traumatized. So the number of times I have been a journalist and, say, been in a hospital in Iraq where a child has just suffered grievous injuries following a rocket attack and TV reporters were there with cameras, like, right in the kid's face and - we would never do things like that. We've developed a very careful template for our methodology, which is essentially questions, but they're not leading questions - so no leading questions, no trauma. Journalists have this tremendous skill, which is interviewing, but there was a real gap between the ability that journalists have and their ability to submit their evidence to courts of law. And I know this because I was called to The Hague several times for wars in Sierra Leone, for Bosnia, for Kosovo. And often my notebooks just weren't up to scratch. They were great notebooks for fact-checkers, but they weren't good notebooks for lawyers. SUMMERS: I'd like to ask you, do you believe that war correspondents have a responsibility in the legal prosecution of war criminals compared to, say, someone who is a reporter in the United States on a city or a crime beat? DI GIOVANNI: I do, actually. I absolutely do believe that war reporters who witness these things have a kind of responsibility. It's a moral responsibility. And there's many - and I have many colleagues who said to me, you know, look. I'm not a social worker, and I am just a reporter. And I'm here to bring the facts. That's fine. Also, there are the issues of impartiality and neutrality and objectivity. For me, it was always a very different thing. It was more about bringing a voice to people that didn't have a voice, and it was about bearing witness. SUMMERS: You have discussed how your project aims to meet at the intersection of storytelling and legal accountability. And to some people, that might seem like two distinctly different jobs, one being journalism, the other activism. Do you draw the line between the two, and can one be both? Listen to the full episode or read the full transcript at National Public Radio's website here.

A mother and son in front of their house in Izium, Ukraine, on Wednesday.Credit...Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press/New York Times KYIV — Three months ago I met Vyacheslav Zadorenko, a community leader from the Kharkiv region. From the relative safety of Derhachi, he told me about how his village, a settlement on the Russian border, had been occupied in the first days of Russia’s invasion. His mother didn’t manage to escape. “My personal victory,” he said, “would be when I can return to my family house.” In midsummer, as Russia consolidated its gains and slowly secured more, that seemed a sad, impossible dream. But now it’s come true. A video posted on Telegram shows Mr. Zadorenko reunited with his mother. “I’ve gathered all your things, my dear son,” she says, running toward him excitedly. “I knew you’d come to liberate me; I was waiting.” Bending down to hug her, he replies, “Mom, you’re as beautiful as ever.” It’s a remarkable scene, one no doubt played out across the thousands of square miles of territory the Ukrainian forces have recaptured in recent days. A striking counteroffensive that liberated, according to the government, around 150,000 people, it has altered the shape of the nearly-seven-month conflict, delivering to Ukrainians a renewed sense of hope and a body blow to Russia. Read the full story in The New York Times here.

In some places the enemy has abandoned positions, guns and even roubles. Elsewhere, resistance is fiercer Photograph: Ukrainian presidential press-ser/AFP/Getty Images It’s a liberation – something Ukrainians have been awaiting for half a year now. According to President Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian army has taken more than 6,000 sq km from the Russian occupation – including a few towns in the Donbas, which took months for the Russian army to capture. Any image appearing from a newly liberated town is watched with fascination. I was glued to a short video showing the Ukrainian army entering Balakliya – the first of the larger towns liberated in the Kharkiv region. The ladies in the town emerged from basements, hugging the military and suggesting they stay and eat. “Boys, we have some pancakes left,” they said. The soldiers begged off: “We can’t now, please, perhaps a bit later,” they replied, in the tone children usually reserve for their mothers. “We need to go on, and it’s dangerous here – you need to be evacuated.” Read the full story in The Guardian here.

«Со временем замечаешь закономерности в любом массовом убийстве» Журналистка Vanity Fair Джанин ди Джованни 35 лет пишет о войнах. В Буче ей пришлось заново учиться расследовать военные преступления. Вот как это было 01:02, 13 сентября 2022 Источник: Vanity Fair Джанин ди Джованни — журналистка, которая за 35 лет карьеры побывала на многих войнах и наблюдала целый ряд вооруженных конфликтов, от Сьерра-Леоне до Палестины и Ирака. В мае 2022 года ди Джованни отправилась в Бучу — после того, как российские войска отступили из Киевской области. Для ди Джованни это уже третья война, в которой участвует Владимир Путин: до этого она писала репортажи из Чечни и Сирии. Но в этот раз она приехала на войну не только как журналист. Теперь ди Джованни помогает собирать доказательства военных преступлений по строгим методикам, соответствующим стандартам международных уголовных судов. О том, как она пришла к этой работе и что увидела в Буче, Джанин ди Джованни рассказала в большом материале для журнала Vanity Fair. С любезного разрешения автора и редакции «Медуза» публикует его полный перевод. Full translation published in Meduza here.

Janine Di Giovanni, The Reckoning Project's Executive Director and Co-Founder, joined Apple News Today to discuss her mission in merging journalistic and legal expertise to hold perpetrators of war crimes accountable. Listen for free on Apple Podcasts here.