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Ukrainian Nobel Peace Laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk explains the important role of citizens on the front lines in Ukraine’s fight for freedom
Photo Credit: Christian Streili
Oleksandra Matviichuk, a human rights lawyer and the first Nobel Peace laureate from Ukraine, delivered the annual Salzburg Lecture during Salzburg Global Weekend on July 1, 2023. The Salzburg Lecture was inaugurated in 2017 to mark Salzburg Global Seminar’s 70th anniversary, and it recognizes the extraordinary contribution of citizens that take personal responsibility for shaping a more peaceful and thriving world, often at great risk.
Oleksandra leads the human rights organizations Center for Civil Liberties, which she established in 2007 to advocate for democratic reforms and protect human rights in Ukraine. As a human rights lawyer, Oleksandra defends people and human dignity. She has received a Nobel Peace Prize for her work and hopes that her documentation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine for the past 9 years will enable “all the Russians who committed these crimes with their own hands, as well as Putin, Lukashenko, and senior political leadership and high military command of [the] Russian state [to be] held accountable.”
Following Salzburg Global Weekend’s theme of Democracy on the Front Lines, Oleksandra’s lecture focused on the role of citizens in upholding democratic values. She dedicated her Salzburg Lecture to the “power of ordinary people,” saying “when you can't rely on legal instruments, you still can rely on people.” The efforts of everyday Ukrainians in “these dramatic times provide us an opportunity to reveal the best in us, to be courageous, to fight for freedom, to make difficult but right choices, and to help each other. Now, maybe like never before, we are acutely aware of what it means to be a human.”
Throughout her lecture, Oleksandra shared several moving anecdotes with the audience about Ukrainian victims of Russian war crimes. She believes it is important to remember individuals because of “how quickly war turns people into numbers. Because the scale of war crimes grows so large that it has become impossible to recognize all the stories.”
Oleksandra highlighted three stories meant to demonstrate the role of citizens on the front lines throughout several major challenges for Ukraine. The first story centered around the Euromaidan protests and the 2014 Revolution of Dignity in which more than one hundred demonstrators “died under the flags of Ukraine and the European Union.” She recalled her efforts with other lawyers and volunteers to defend the human rights of the arrested protestors, despite being opposed by “the entire state machine that wanted to destroy us physically”.
She took away from this experience that “in different countries of the world, every day, many people also fight for freedom and human dignity. However, the total history of humankind convincingly proved that people should not give up. Even when we have no tools, our own words and own personal stance always remain.”
The second story involved the Russian occupation of Crimea and Donbas. According to Oleksandra’s understanding, Putin initiated this “war of aggression” to thwart any chance of Ukraine’s democratic transformation. She explained, “Putin is afraid of the idea of freedom which came closer to Russian borders. And that is why it is not just a war between two states. This is a war between two systems: authoritarianism and democracy.”
Despite documenting horrific war crimes occurring in Crimea and eastern Ukraine and sending reports to multiple international organizations, she recalled that “nobody cared” and “nothing has stopped”. Nevertheless, it was ordinary people who participated in demonstrations across more than 35 countries calling for the release of Ukrainian political prisoners, including Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov. The “huge impact of the collective action of thousands of people in different countries of the world” was that Sentsov and dozens of other Ukrainian political prisoners were released from Russian captivity in 2019.
Oleksandra conveyed with this story that “there are a lot of things which have no limitation in national borders. Freedom is such a thing, but human solidarity is also such a thing. The mass mobilization of a huge amount of people in different countries of the world can change this story quicker than UN intervention.”
The large-scale war of Russia against Ukraine was the subject of Oleksandra’s final story. When the Russian invasion started in February 2022, “international organizations and foreign governments evacuated their personnel. But ordinary people remained, and ordinary people started to do extraordinary things.” The power of people was miscalculated by both Putin and the West, as Oleksandra explained that Ukraine has never enjoyed the luxury of well-functioning state institutions, so “when challenges emerge, people get used to taking responsibility on their own shoulders.”
When the large-scale war started, Ukrainian civil society expanded rapidly, and “suddenly it appeared that ordinary people who are fighting for their freedom and for their human dignity are more significant than [Russia’s] army number two in the world.” This experience proved that “ordinary people's efforts have practical impacts and determine the outcome of this war.”
Oleksandra ended by raising several questions for the audience to consider, asking “How will we protect people, their dignity, their rights, and their freedom in the 21st century?” She emphasized that “human rights, progress, and peace are inextricably linked. Freedom and human rights can't be achieved once and for all. We make our own choice every day.”
Global challenges are only getting worse, and we need “a new humanist movement” that would “engage people in the protection of rights and freedom and demand the cardinal reform of the entire international system of peace and security” because “freedom and human rights are universal and have no state borders.” Oleksandra’s words serve as a powerful reminder that, whether living under foreign occupation or in a developed democracy, ordinary people are the ones who must take responsibility and fight for their future.
Read the full transcript of Oleksandra Matviichuk's speech here.