Thank you very much for providing me the floor. It's a huge honour for me to address this distinguished audience.
I am a human rights lawyer, and I have been documenting war crimes in the war that Russia launched against Ukraine. We united our efforts with dozens of organizations from different regions and built a national network of local documenters. Working together for only two years on this large-scale work, we jointly documented more than 72,000 episodes of war crimes.
Russia uses war crimes as a method of warfare. Russia deliberately provides enormous pain to Ukrainian civilians in order to break people's resistance and occupy the country. We document not just violations of the Geneva Conventions; we document human pain.
I would like to focus on the human rights violations under Russian occupation, but first let me assure you that people in Ukraine want peace much more than anyone else. Peace doesn't come when a country that was invaded stops fighting. That's not peace; that's occupation, and occupation is just another form of war.
People under occupation have no tools to defend their rights, their freedom, their lives, their property and their loved ones. They live in a grey zone. Russian occupation doesn't change one state of life to another. Russian occupation means torture, forced disappearances, rape, denial of your identity, forcible adoption of your own children, concentration camps and mass graves.
The story of 59-year-old Father Stepan Podolchak illustrates this brilliantly. Two months ago, Russians came to his house. They took the priest away, putting everything in his house upside down. He was taken with a bag on his head and barefoot. After two days, Russians told his wife that Father Stepan Podolchak was dead. Russians tortured him to death only because he refused to transfer his church to the Moscow Patriarchate.
As a lawyer, I am in a very difficult situation. We have no legal tools to stop these Russian atrocities and save Ukrainian civilians. The war turns people into numbers, which I have started to witness myself, because the scale of war crimes grows so large that it becomes impossible to recognize all the stories.
However, I would like to tell you one. This is the story of 62-year-old civilian Oleksandr Shelipov, who was killed by the Russian military near his house. This tragedy received huge media coverage only because it was the first court trial after the large-scale war started. In court, his wife Kateryna shared that her husband was an ordinary farmer, but he was her whole universe, and now she has lost everything.
What we are doing in reality as human rights lawyers is trying to return to people their names, because only justice can do that. We want to ensure justice for all victims of this war, regardless of who they are, their social positions, the types of crimes they endured and whether or not the media or international organizations are interested in their case, because the life of each person matters.
I'm here to ask you for support for our fight for justice. We must establish a special tribunal on aggression and hold Putin, Lukashenko and the top political leadership and high military command of the Russian state accountable, because all the atrocities that we are now documenting are the result of their leadership decision to start such a war. This is common logic. If we want to prevent wars in the future, we have to punish the state and the leaders who start such wars in the present.
Thank you.
