I have expected myself to be in such a situation, because my main instrument over all of these 20 years I've worked in the human rights protection field was law, but now law is not working. Law couldn't protect people in occupied territories. At Euromaidan SOS, every day we received dozens of requests for help from people in Kherson, Melitopol, Berdyansk, Kahovka, Slavutych and Energodar.
They asked us for help, because they couldn't escape from the city. They told us about enforced disappearances; about threats; about beatings; about intimidation; and about illegal arrests of their relatives, neighbours and active people like journalists, human rights defenders, civil activists, etc. Unfortunately, I saw with my own eyes how the whole of HLAC, the humanitarian law of armed conflict, the Geneva Convention and all of international law, which I devoted my whole life to, now lay in the ruins and is not helping me do my work to protect people, their freedoms, their lives and their rights. That's why I made a tough choice—sorry, but we want to survive.
Sooner or later, the war will finish and we will be able to restore the international order, and I believe totally that legal mechanisms in the future will work and that the traitors will be held accountable for their work and face the international court or an international hybrid tribunal if we create it. But for the current moment, we are dying, and there is no other choice for us other than to defend ourselves from Russian troops and save our civilians. We couldn't defend our people, our land and our values unarmed, which is why I ask for weapons.
Even if I ask for weapons, I know for sure that Putin is not afraid of NATO; Putin is afraid of the idea of freedom. He started this war in 2014 when we had a revolution of dignity, ruined an authoritarian regime and obtained a chance to provide a great democratic transformation. Now in this war, we ask for weapons because we want to live and build a country where the rights of everybody are protected, where the judiciary is independent, where government is accountable and police don't beat peaceful demonstrators.
Thank you.