{"id":597782,"date":"2025-11-27T19:58:17","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T19:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/597782\/"},"modified":"2025-11-27T19:58:17","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T19:58:17","slug":"us-deal-must-punish-russia-war-crimes-says-ukraines-nobel-peace-prize-winner-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/597782\/","title":{"rendered":"US deal must punish Russia war crimes, says Ukraine\u2019s Nobel peace prize winner | Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Any peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine<\/a> that includes an amnesty for war crimes could encourage other authoritarian leaders to attack their neighbours, Ukraine\u2019s only Nobel peace prize winner has warned.<\/p>\n

Oleksandra Matviichuk said the leaked 28-point US-Russia plan did not account for \u201cthe human dimension\u201d and she supported President Volodymyr Zelenskyy\u2019s efforts to rewrite it in dialogue with White House.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need a peace, but not a pause that provides Russia<\/a> a chance to retreat and regroup,\u201d the Kyiv-based human rights lawyer said. A durable settlement must include Nato-like guarantees for Ukraine, she added.<\/p>\n

Matviichuk is the head of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, which was jointly awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2022, and she has been influential in arguing that Russia has developed a \u201cgenocidal character\u201d<\/a> because the international community has not restrained it enough.<\/p>\n

Comments such as hers reflect widespread sentiment in Ukraine. Even after nearly four years of attritional fighting, with power cuts frequently following Russian attacks, there is little appetite to accept territorial concessions, and few Ukrainians believe there can be a permanent end to the war without an effective security framework.<\/p>\n

The human rights lawyer argued that clause 26 of the initial US-Russia proposal, which said: \u201cAll parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to make any claims or consider any complaints in the future,\u201d was particularly problematic.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would ruin international law and the UN Charter<\/a> [which urges refraining from attacks on neighbours] to create a precedent that would encourage other authoritarian leaders, that you can invade a country, kill people and erase their identity, and you will be rewarded with new territories,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Volodymyr Zelenskyy holding talks in Kyiv with the US army secretary Dan Driscoll last week. Photograph: AP<\/p>\n

It has been dropped from the Ukraine-US 19-point counter proposal but negotiations will continue into next week, when Donald Trump\u2019s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, visits Moscow for talks with Russian leaders. Kremlin officials insist there will be no changes, raising fears the US may try to impose Russian terms on Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Conceding Kramatorsk<\/a>, Sloviansk<\/a> and the 30% of the eastern Donetsk region still under Ukrainian control, as Russia has demanded in its 28 points, would not necessarily provide a stable basis for peace, Matviichuk argued, because \u201cPutin did not start this war for land\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Russian president\u2019s goal was to subjugate Ukraine, she said. \u201cIt\u2019s naive to think Putin lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers for tiny Ukrianian cities which the majority of Russians couldn\u2019t find on the map.\u201d A peace plan would succeed only if it was \u201cimpossible for him to achieve his goal\u201d.<\/p>\n

Ukraine, she argued, \u201cdeserves to be a part of Nato\u201d, able to make a strong contribution to the alliance with its enforced military experience. If that was not possible politically, then only \u201ca complex of measures which will have the same power as Nato\u2019s article 5\u201d would deter Russia from attacking Ukraine again.<\/p>\n

Matviichuk said a peace agreement should also protect the rights of an estimated 6 million Ukrainians living in Russian-occupied territories, including 1.5 million children. \u201cRussian occupation means torture, rape, filtration camps and mass graves, yet there are zero words about these people,\u201d in the 28-point plan, she said.<\/p>\n

A resident of Sloviansk picks their way through the debris of a school building destroyed by Russian air strikes on Tuesday. Photograph: Anatolii Stepanov\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Leaked copies of the initial US-Russia text make only a hazy reference to Ukrainians living under occupation. It says both countries should \u201cabolish all discriminatory measures and guarantee the rights of Ukrainian and Russian media and education\u201d.<\/p>\n

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The CCL has helped document 92,178 \u201cprobable war crimes\u201d by Russian actors in Ukraine since 2014, when Moscow ordered the invasion of Crimea and separatists took control of parts of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Full-scale fighting erupted in February 2022 with the Russian invasion.<\/p>\n

Though Ukraine remains under pressure militarily, with Russian forces advancing at points in the east and south, its armies are not defeated and there is a widespread belief that they can continue to inflict heavy losses on the invaders and eventually force a reassessment, despite the human cost.<\/p>\n

Inna Sovsun, an opposition MP from the liberal Holos party, said giving up the rest of Donetsk without a fight was \u201cone of the most unacceptable conditions in the current discussions\u201d and that Ukraine had to alter it in its diplomatic talks with the US.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor Russia to seize Donetsk militarily, it would need roughly a year of extremely intense fighting\u201d, she said, and it would sustain many casualties in the process. \u201cRussia currently lacks the capability to take these areas, and conceding them would only create a new staging ground for future attacks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Russia is close to taking control of Pokrovsk, a once militarily important coal-mining town in Donetsk, after a protracted 15-month battle. Its military has sustained about 1,000 casualties a day since June, according to UK estimates, across all fronts, though the most intense fighting has been in the region.<\/p>\n

Halyna Yanchenko, an independent MP formerly from the president\u2019s Servant of the People party, said \u201cUkrainians want peace more than anyone\u201d but that \u201cafter 11 years of war, we know exactly what peace on Russia\u2019s terms looks like\u201d.<\/p>\n

She added that the president, politicians such as her and the country had no choice but to engage with the US. \u201cAll of us are working together to explain our position, counter Russian lobbying and disinformation, and make sure the US doesn\u2019t accept Russian demands. Because that would undo years of diplomatic effort.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Any peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine that includes an amnesty for war crimes could encourage other authoritarian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":597783,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7654],"tags":[2000,299,657],"class_list":{"0":"post-597782","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ukraine","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115623435082621396","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597782\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/597783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}