Reporters documenting Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine: ‘Our work is for the future we can not foresee yet’

In the fall of 2022, when the Kharkiv region was liberated, Ukrainian poet and writer Victoria Amelina visited the village of Kapytolivka, near Izyum (Kharkiv Oblast, eastern Ukraine). There she dug the diary of another writer, Volodymyr Vakulenko, out of the ground –  the author of children's books was shot dead by the occupying forces, his body was later found in a pine forest, turned into a mass grave. Vakulenko managed to bury his handwritten notes in the garden.  

“Volodymyr’s message was saved, even if I was to step on some anti-infantry mine the next day”, Amelina wrote in a foreword to Vakulenko’s book. Just a couple of days after the book’s presentation at a book festival in Kyiv, Victoria Amelina went on another field mission to the east of Ukraine. She was having dinner at a restaurant in Kramatorsk with a group from Colombia when the Russian missile hit the building. She did not step on a mine, but was killed by another Russian weapon. She was 37.  I’ve been working as a war crimes documenter for The Reckoning Project, an initiative led by journalists, lawyers, and analysts, for three years. I’ve always been interested in how my colleagues reflect on their work, their insights from working with witnesses, and thoughts on self-care and trauma. Amelina's book Looking at Women Looking at War was published in English, Italian and French. The idea that the lives of people involved in documenting this war are woven into the events of the war struck me.

What gives them the strength to continue their work in such turbulent conditions, I kept asking myself, just like the documenters often ask war crimes witnesses about what gave them the strength to get through the ordeal. 

‘I’ve been determined to get to the essence of the attacks’ 

Angelina Kariakina remembers a conversation they had in the Public Interest Journalism Lab (PIJL) during the first days of the full-scale invasion. What was the best they could do as journalists in that situation? “We’re going to document war crimes”, said Nataliya Gumeniuk, Angelina’s friend and colleague with whom they once founded The Lab. 

PIJL, as a Ukrainian NGO, co-founded The Reckoning Project together with an American journalist, Janine di Giovanni, and British writer Peter Pomerantsev. 

The aim was to document war crimes with an established methodology, and to make survivors’ stories heard by the public by producing reportages, movies, and other media content. All that to ensure justice in the court as well as among public opinion.

At that time, Angelina was also the General Producer for the News Service of Suspilne, the Ukrainian Public Broadcaster. Her house near Kyiv was occupied for over a month, but was liberated when the Russian troops withdrew from northern Ukraine. A bullet hole in Angelina’s bedroom wall was one of the pieces of evidence that the Russian soldiers were inside her house. 

She engaged in documenting atrocities in the Kyiv region, went to Bucha to see bodies of civilians shot dead on the streets with her own eyes, and to listen to what the witnesses had to say. Having seen and heard this made it possible to dismantle Russian propaganda in her comments to foreign media. 

Alongside the liberated Kyiv region, the city of Mariupol was in the news  every day that spring. Russian bombs were destroying it day by day and civilians were trapped in the midst of hell. Among the most horrible news from Mariupol was the Russian attack on the maternity hospital, also depicted in the Oscar-winning documentary 20 Days in Mariupol. 

Angelina started documenting the testimonies of the people leaving the town. During this work she discovered she was pregnant.   

“I felt like someone slapped me in the face”, she described the feeling she encountered when reading about someone's injury or death.  “I wanted to get to the essence of this practice. This is what drove me, not emotions”, she says. Her way to cope was to concentrate her research on Russian attacks on hospitals and maternity wards, not only in Ukraine but also during the previous Russian wars: in Chechnya and Syria. 

Recording testimonies from people who witnessed Russian bombardments of hospitals in Grozny and Aleppo, Angelina wanted to understand whether it was a deliberate tactic and, if so, what the aim was. 

“It was deliberate. People can stay in a besieged city without many services. But when there is no hospital in the city, it is not possible to live there, so the residents flee. This is how Russians force people to surrender”. 

‘The work pulled me out of it’

Oleh Baturin joined a team of war crimes documenters after he himself was abducted in March 2022 and kept in unlawful detention. 

Before the invasion, Baturin had been working as a local correspondent in the Kherson region for more than 20 years. When Russia annexed Crimea and occupied parts of eastern Ukraine, he also reported from the peninsula and investigated the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 by Russia-backed forces. 

As an investigative reporter, Oleh became an obvious target for the occupying forces. In every captured city and village, they followed a clear plan to eliminate or drag to their side local leaders, activists, and journalists. 

In March 2022, he received a call from a distant acquaintance who asked him to meet. Oleh left home in his town, Kakhovka, telling his wife that if he wasn't back in 20 minutes, it meant something had happened to him. 

The bad feeling proved to be true. Right on the street, several armed men in military uniforms and balaclavas captured him. He was beaten and intimidated. “We can sentence you to execution”, he was told, as he remembers for a film about journalists' persecution in the occupied territories. 

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‘There are things we have to do without thinking much about the future. Maybe our work will help shape a new framework of justice in the world’ – Viktoria Balytska

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Oleh spent a week in a grim and cold cell. “You won’t write anything anymore”, the torturers said to him. 

He was probably released due to the publicity and the fact that the system of repression in the newly occupied territories was not yet well-organized. It took Oleh and his wife three days to cross 33 checkpoints set up by the Russian military on the roads. 

Oleh joined the The Reckoning Project team just a month after his release. He started documenting war crimes conducted in his native region. “This work helped me sort out my feelings after my detention, pulled my mind out of it,” he reflects today.

Since part of his native Kherson region was liberated in the autumn of 2022, Oleh regularly goes there to interview witnesses of war crimes. His deep knowledge of the local context gives him a chance to achieve what outsiders could not. Local mayors, village leaders, and farmers share stories with him that they don’t feel safe publishing now. They entrust them to Oleh for him to publish when the time comes, i.e. when it would be safe for their relatives who still live in the occupied territory. 

“It is so important for people that their story be heard, that it will stay in a collective memory and be published when the time comes. The survivors want the others to know what they have lived through”, he explains.

As a public figure, Oleh continued to give interviews. In 2023, Oleh became a critical witness for the investigation of the abduction of a U.S. citizen from his home in the Kherson region. The man was tortured and kept in unlawful confinement by four Russia-affiliated military personnel. Since then, the US has decided to withdraw from the group investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

‘Russian captivity survival guide book’

Alongside the historical value of the witness testimonies, there’s a very practical one. Local Ukrainian prosecutors follow Oleh’s publications based on witness testimonies, and so these texts could lead to opening investigations against potential war criminals. 

And there’s even more urgent value in his work: it helps relatives of missing people to establish their whereabouts. Often, when talking with someone about their detention, Oleh learns about another missing person and can pass this crucial information on to a family member. This could be the only way for the family to know what happened or where the Russians keep their brother. 

Oleh's words echo Angelina's reflections about the use of testimonies. 

“I have friends who were in Russian captivity back in 2014. And I’ve suddenly realized that our conversations in my kitchen have become kind of a survival guidebook – a way to share experiences about how to survive in Russian captivity”, says Angelina, adding she has realized she wants to pass this knowledge on to the next generations. 

She concludes with, “I know, this sounds wild”, but it’s not that wild if we look at Ukraine’s history. The parallel with the dissidents and political prisoners of the Soviet times is clear. The idea of the survival guide book no longer seems as wild as before. 

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This parallel with surviving atrocities of the 20th century appears in a conversation with another colleague, Ghanna Mamonova. A huge bulk of her work as a war crimes documenter is recording the testimonies of illegal detentions and torture in the occupied Kherson region. 

Ghanna stressed her mission didn’t start in 2022, and not even in 2014, when Russia invaded Luhansk, her native city in the East of Ukraine. 

During her university years in the early 2000s, as a journalism student, she recorded interviews with Holodomor survivors – the Great Famine organized by the Stalin regime in the 1930s to subdue Ukrainian farmers. The people she spoke to were older than 80. 

The unlimited perspective

Separating work and personal life is one piece of advice given to journalists on how to avoid burnout. Keep your work out of your home, or at least don’t take a working laptop to your bedroom. However, it’s not that easy. 

In July 2024, Russia launched another massive attack on Kyiv. Missiles hit a children's hospital Okhmatdyt, partially destroying it, as well as a reproductive medicine clinic in another neighborhood of the capital. Angelina’s father had an office in that clinic. When she arrived at the scene of the attack, she saw a huge hole. What a miracle that he survived.  

In the following months, Angelina had to use all her knowledge about trauma to help her father, who lost several colleagues in one day. 

“How is it possible that they are here for one minute, having lunch, and then suddenly they are gone?” he kept repeating. Angelina says that, despite her efforts to help him use her knowledge of mental first aid response, the best way to bring joy back into her parents' life was the time they spent with their grandson.  

War crime researchers put forward their own, different answers to how to take care of themselves. The first rule is to keep doing your work. The second rule is to keep its goal in mind. 

The goal takes a rhizomatic shape. We document witness testimonies for courts that are being held right now in Ukraine and abroad. In April 2024, a Ukrainian man who was tortured on occupied territory filed a criminal complaint to the Argentine Federal Judiciary with the help of the Reckoning Project team. Argentina is among the countries that can make use of the principle of universal jurisdiction to try international crimes committed anywhere in the world. Several other countries have started their investigations, and the ICC has issued arrest warrants to Putin and several other Russians. 

At the same time, courts are not the only goal, and justice happens not only there. Making survivors' stories heard in the media, in documentary movies, or on stage is one dimension of justice. Memorialisation of those events and the experiences of people who survived is another way, keeping these testimonies for memory and history.  

This understanding of a goal was well formulated by Viktoria Balytska, another war crimes journalist who deals with the cases of abductions and torture, and drone attacks on civilians: “There are things we have to do without thinking much about the future. Maybe our work will help shape a new framework of justice in the world. Anyway, we should do this work keeping in mind the long-term perspective. It could be the future we cannot foresee yet”, says Balytska. 

Documenting as a response to mass violence

Looking at Women Looking at War by Viktoria Amelina is a book about women who were documenting Russian aggressions and war crimes. It allows the reader to look behind the curtains of what those who bring the truth about Russia’s war crimes to the world think and feel. An editorial team edited the book because Amelina only got to finish about 60% of the manuscript. 

A Ukrainian court has sentenced a man who passed the Russians information about the Kramatorsk restaurant in which Amelina and the international group were having dinner to life imprisonment. The court has also sentenced two men who abducted and tortured Oleh in absentia, for violating the laws and customs of war as well as international humanitarian law. 

Atrocities are happening every day in the occupied territories of Ukraine, and missiles, drones, and bombs ruin lives and infrastructure every day all over the country. The so-called peace talks are accompanied by the most murderous attacks on Ukrainian cities, like the night attack on Kyiv on April 24th, where 12 people lost their lives, or on Sumy a week before Easter, with a death toll of 35. 

It’s harder to stay committed without support, but Ghanna Mamonova says it is even more visible to her in the moments when some politicians are lost and call peace what is obviously a war. As Oleh Baturin notes, this change in international discourse about Russia's responsibility affects him emotionally, but he also observes changes in the witnesses' attitude. “I now meet people who are discouraged from talking, who see no sense in testifying.” This in no case means, he emphasizes, that they are scared and want to forget. 

War crimes witnesses and survivors still demand justice, and journalists continue to document those crimes, keeping in mind a broader goal. As they say, these testimonies have to be collected and preserved, regardless of what is happening at the moment.