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
The Memorial press conference in Berlin, 25 February 2025. Photo: Polina Makarova/Novaya Gazeta Europe
Human rights advocates from the Russian Nobel-Prize-winning human rights organisation Memorial discussed their findings in Berlin on Tuesday after carrying out their first monitoring mission to Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale war.
A Memorial delegation, led by the organisation’s co-chairman Oleg Orlov, visited the Kyiv, Odesa, Chernihiv and Kherson regions with Ukrainian colleagues in January. Orlov said that while documenting fresh war crimes had constituted an important part of the mission, the delegation had also spoken to relatives of those who had died in the war and former prisoners who had been exchanged.
“We wanted to contribute to the great work our colleagues do and to document new crimes. But we also visited places that have already been studied by human rights activists. We were in Bucha to see how those events were investigated and how our colleagues created war crime databases,” Orlov said.
The Memorial representatives said that there was nothing unplanned about Russian crimes in Ukraine, noting that the same methods of torture had previously been used by the Russian military in Chechnya and Syria.
Residents of liberated regions of Ukraine told Memorial that the Russian military had gone house to house with lists of names in a process known as “screening”. Once found, those on the list were typically detained, imprisoned and tortured, though there were also cases of people being shot or simply released.
“Screening was used to terrorise Ukrainian citizens. We still have no data on how many people have been screened and where some of those people have ended up. These are all blanks in this war that still need to be filled in,” Yevhen Zakharov, director of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, which organised the trip, told reporters.
Memorial’s Natalia Morozova said that one of the group’s goals was to reveal the identities of those who committed war crimes in Ukraine, noting that perpetrators were afraid of being identified and would either cover their faces with balaclavas or blindfold detainees during torture sessions. If peace negotiations began, Morozova said it was vital that war crimes not be forgotten or for their perpetrators to go unpunished. “Peace with impunity will not last. It only encourages more crime,” Morozova added.