Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a year ago I’ve been working with an alliance of journalists and lawyers, the Reckoning Project, to collect evidence of war crimes that are also used for long-form stories about atrocities. If all the evidence-collectors – who also include local teachers, open-source intelligence nerds and first responders – band together, then maybe we can start to fight back against the mountains of Russia’s murders and lies. ‘Russia wants to divide us,’ my colleague Janine di Giovanni told the justice conference in Lviv, ‘but if we co-ordinate we can be more than the sum of our parts.’ If we really want to win then we need to look at ‘justice’ not only in courts of law, but also in courts of public opinion, and of sanctions, culture, technology, diplomacy. Anyone proven to be responsible for atrocities needs to know there will be a reckoning even if we never bring them to The Hague.
The weeks around the anniversary of the invasion were busy for the Reckoning Project. Months of work produced stories for the cover of Time and elsewhere. As she goes through our testimonies, Janine tells me she has seen much of it before: she reported from Vladimir Putin’s bludgeoning of Grozny and Aleppo. This is a pattern of intentional behaviour by Russia and it didn’t start in February 2022.
Read the full story in The Spectator.