The Lawfare Podcast: Memorializing Babyn Yar after the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

[Introduction]

Maksym Rokmaniko: After this massacre, there was a major concentration camp. It was located directly across the street from Babyn Yar. And the laborers of this camp in the end of German occupation were ordered to go to Babyn Yar, dig up all these human remains, and burn them. And that's the first time when you see, on this specific site, this kind of violent attempt to cover up for the war crime.

Tyler McBrien: I'm Tyler McBrien, Managing Editor of Lawfare, and this is the Lawfare Podcast, July 1, 2022. When a Russian missile recently struck a TV tower in Kyiv near Babyn Yar, the site of Nazi mass murders during the Holocaust, some saw the attack as a potent symbol of the tragic occurrence of violence in Ukraine. In her recent New York Times essay, “The Bloody Echoes of Babyn Yar,” Linda Kinstler wrote, the current war in Ukraine is so oversaturated with historical meaning. It is unfolding on soil that has absorbed wave after wave of the dead, where soldiers do not always have to dig trenches in the forest because the old ones remain.

To talk through the historical significance of the attack, I sat down with Linda, a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley. Linda is also the author of “Come to This Court and Cry, How the Holocaust Ends,” which is out in the U.S. on August 23rd from PublicAffairs. I was also joined by Maksym Rokmaniko, an architect, designer, entrepreneur, and director at the Center for Spatial Technologies in Kyiv, Ukraine.

We discussed the history of Babyn Yar as a site and symbol, the role of open-source investigative techniques and forensic modeling in the documentation of war crimes, the battle over historical narratives, memorialization, and memory in achieving justice for victims of negation and genocide. It's the Lawfare Podcast, July 1^st: Memorializing Babyn Yar after the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.

[Introduction]

So I wanted to start our conversation in March of this year when Russia launched a missile strike on a TV tower in Kyiv. You've both written about or investigated this particular strike, even though as people have pointed out, it's not, wasn't the deadliest or, or most militarily strategic. Maksym, I'd love to start with you. Why, why investigate this particular attack? What's its significance?

Maksym Rokmaniko: Yeah, this is a question to unpack. I have to say, I have a strong personal connection to this place. I live in Lukianivska district of Kyiv, from which you can see the TV tower very well. You can in fact see it from my bedroom. And I've lived in that area for most of my life. But also for the two years, starting from the end of 2019, the team that I run did an investigation about one of these major Holocaust sites, which is Babyn Yar, which is basically buried under the territory, which is now called Babyn Yar, on top of which the TV tower has been constructed.

So we've been researching that place using this kind of forensic architecture type of tools, reconstructing the terrain digitally, mapping the events, and we know that place really well. So, when the first missile landed on Kyiv on the 24th of February, our team was kind of ready to, to do this work. We didn't even have a discussion about kind of mapping these events, collecting evidence and stuff like that. In fact, we were immediately on mirrorboard, which is a tool for like digital mapping, trying to understand from which directions this missile came, missiles came and, you know, basically trying to, as in as much of a detail as possible, understand what's going on.

And that was kind of a chaotic process. We couldn't, basically, we couldn't decide what will be our first investigation until these two missiles landed very near to the territory that we studied for two years. So, once I saw dead bodies right next to Babyn Yar, the missile exploding right next to the TV tower, which I can see from my window, it kind of, it was so close to home that it couldn't be anything else than this case as the first investigation in this series that we, we launched.

Tyler McBrien: As you unpacked things, there are many more things there to unpack further, but first, Linda, I wanted to ask you the same question. For you, why write about this particular attack?

Linda Kinstler: Yeah, I mean, I think when I saw that the missiles had, you know, landed at that particular area of Kyiv, it just struck me, you know, I think from the American perspective, especially kind of in the early days of this full scale invasion, you know, people are really grasping to understand exactly what was going on, why it was happening now, what was actually unfolding, unfolding upon the territory of Kyiv. And you know, that particular territory, I had been going there for many years because it is also the site of Babyn Yar, which, you know, was the largest massacre of Jews to take place during World War II. It was like kind of the starting spot of what is called the ‘Holocaust by Bullets.’ And so I had been very familiar with that place because of its immense historical meaning.

And you know, I had been speaking to a lot of colleagues and friends as the kind of war was unleashed, trying to explain the full gravity and perversity of the logic behind it. And, you know, when I saw that strike upon Babyn Yar, I thought, well, this is exposing everything that is being lost in real time in Ukraine. You know, not just, it's the site that carries so much meaning for contemporary Ukraine, for contemporary Europe, for how we think about, I don't know, European life in the present and also its relation to the past. And in the way that this war is being framed unjustly, as this kind of, you know, attempt, as Vladimir Putin said, to denazify Ukraine. It just seemed to me to be this most ironic, most perverse, most kind of straightforward illustration of the ways that history can be manipulated in the present. And so that's why I thought it was most important to kind of focus on this one strike, at least to begin to explain what's happening.

Tyler McBrien: Absolutely. Linda, you began to sort of set the scene, I think, for some of our listeners who may not be as familiar with Babyn Yar. Maksym, what does Babyn Yar mean to you as you understand it as a site and a symbol for Ukraine? And maybe also, when did you first learn about the site, if you can remember, and what's your sort of personal connection to it?

Maksym Rokmaniko: Right. That's an interesting question. I have to say I, I probably won't be able to remember the first time I heard about it just because, as I said, I live so close to it. So since early days, you, you hear about Babyn Yar and you know what it is. One issue that we were working with is the lack of specificity in that knowledge and in the collective knowledge, because as I said, the site is buried under the layers of kind of Soviet terraforming. The site now doesn't look anything like it was in 1940s. And the work that we were doing was kind of partly directed towards reconstructing that place and understanding how exactly it was.

But I can respond to what it generally means to many people. And you know, like Babyn Yar is the site of, it's one of the most important events in the history of the Holocaust. As Linda said, it's one, it's the biggest at its time, massacre where each person was killed by a bullet. It's, it's, it's this chapter of the Holocaust, which precedes the history that people on the West particularly knows really well, know really well, which is this history of, you know, gas chambers and concentration camps. But it's, it's a really important chapter in the, in the way they were prototyping these technologies of violence. Only in the course of two days in September, 29th and 30th of September, 1941, there's over 33 thousand Jews who were killed at this site. And that, that particular massacre is very well documented.

We know a lot about it. We have a lot of witness testimonies from all sides. We have images, so we understand that particular event really well. Babyn Yar is also a site of murder of many other people than Jews. So, it was the site that Germans systematically used to bring people, either already dead people or people who were shot. And it's a vast territory, it's a vast landscape of ravines that spur through the landscape and kind of continue towards the Dnieper River. And more or less, all of this territory was in one or another way weaponized as this site, as this mass grave. So yes, that's the meaning of this site for, again, if you read Wikipedia pages and historic research.

I have to say that for me personally, it was something a bit more like a project, because you know, we were involved so, so much into this endeavor to memorialize Babyn Yar, which is something that arguably has not been properly done even, even before this war started. So, we worked on the commission of Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, which is again, this endeavor along with, you know, groups, groups of historians and other, other endeavors to, to memorialize this site. And our work particularly was directed towards spatial awareness of how exactly this place looked before.

Before our work, there were many theories about where the mass shooting took place. There were controversies. One of the major historians of this event kind of had an alternative theory of where this place was. So, we basically did reconstruction of the territory in order to understand where exactly the, these mass shootings things happened and yeah, to better, to better understand this, this place.

Linda Kinstler: Yeah, and if I can just add that, you know, something to understand about Babyn Yar is that it's this place that is completely saturated with historical meaning, with contemporary resonance. And as Maksym was describing, there have been, it's this place that's been erased and destroyed and built upon many, many times.

And there were previous memorial efforts and every time a new memorial went up, it reflected something about the state that Ukraine was in at the time. Whether you look at the kind of gargantuan Soviet memorial that is erected there and what, is still to this day what a lot of people think of when they visualize Babyn Yar. Or if you look at the smaller memorials that were erected on the site after the fall of the Soviet Union you know, you kind of- It's this eerie place that is now you know, a kind of placid recreational park with apartment buildings on either side and a metro station deep underground, which of course was used as a bomb shelter after February 25th.

And so it's this, it's this place that you can't escape the meaning, but it's also full, it's a place that is full of contemporary life. And if you, it's a place where you can observe how Ukraine has evolved in narrativizing its own history and thinking through what it is to be a nation.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, that's really interesting and, and I think one thing, Linda, that that's really struck me about reading your reporting and your writing about Babyn Yar is, is your use of the word negation, and also your reference to the poem, “No Monuments Stand Over Babyn Yar.” So I was wondering if you could speak to maybe that apparent contradiction there. that it's a place that has been memorialized many times and yet there is still a negation of what happened or cover up. If you could speak to some of that negation, first by the Nazis themselves and then by the Soviets and, and maybe it's continuation today.

Linda Kinstler: Yeah. I mean, I think first of all, the idea of thinking about genocide as a crime of negation is one that has been espoused by many scholars. You know, I draw upon a lot the work of Marc Nichanian, who's a literary scholar who studied the Armenian Genocide and he looked at how, you know, the event itself was documented. And there were efforts to hold the perpetrators to account, but then the records of the, the efforts to hold these people to account were themselves burned. And so it's this kind of recursive erasure, not only of the crime itself, which erases human life, but also the records of what took place, where it was, if there were any attempts at justice, that kind of thing. And of course, Jean-François Lyotard has also wrote about this.

And I think that for me, it really helps contextualize how much is lost and what is at stake, and especially as we think about memorializing or kind of pursuing tribunals. But to answer your question, basically, after the Soviets retook Kyiv, they did document what had occurred at Babyn Yar. They did, you know, there were survivors, there were prisoners of war, there were kind of local civilians who knew and had observed what had occurred there. So, you know, there were American and Western journalists who were brought to the site and told in English through a translator what had transpired. There were photographs taken, which Maksym has used in his work.

And then, you know, after this kind of initial period of recording, there was this real suspicion of any attempt to think about the specificity of the crime in how it was directed against the Jews of Ukraine and kind of wiped out almost entirely the population there. The Soviets began to think of any kind of demonstration of Jewish collectivity as something that could threaten the greater Soviet project. And I think something to understand is like, of course, you know, as we know from many of his, the historians of the Soviet period, there were different moments when the government tried to support minority languages and tried to kind of celebrate the diversity of the Soviet Union. And then there were other times when they dramatically submerged them. And this was one of those times.

And so then you get not only the banning of any local efforts to, you know, pray for, memorialize, stand over the graves of those who had died, even though of course they didn't know exactly where the graves were. But you also have the physical destruction of the site and Maksym can talk more about that, but you know, there was this infrastructure that was built over the territory, which is quite large and this kind of flattening and, you know, it's kind of rare that you can trace erasure in motion. So it was a real kind of physical instance of the gravity of the crime, I guess.

Tyler McBrien: Sure. And I think that's a good place to sort of fast forward in time to when Maksym you became involved in, investigating or, or rather almost digitally spatially excavating the site. How did you become involved in this investigation in your organization? And what have you found?

Maksym Rokmaniko: Yeah, that's a great question. We were basically commissioned by BYHMC, Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, to 3D model the terrain of Babyn Yar. First in this very kind of simple, almost technical operation, where you have very old topographic maps from the beginning of the century and by digitizing them and by doing certain manipulations to them you would get a 3D terrain.

And since, since that small commission, every step of our work added new dimension to this model. So first we just had a 3D dimension, the model of the site as it was in 1924. Then we added a bit more details to see how this terrain was changing. Then we started to find photographs from this place and searching for these distinguishing elements of the terrain that we could pinpoint on photographs. And that really helped us to understand this terrain better and to understand where these events took place. We also worked with aerial images which reveal a lot about this territory, how it was used.

Then we also did this kind of extra layer of research where we collected all witness testimonies about Babyn Yar. And we processed them, we processed them in a way where we basically were able to spot locations in what people mentioned. And to connect them to specific key, key spots, such that if you would, let's say, look up an undressing spot, you would, you would hear all of the story of all the witnesses about what exactly happened at this, at this location.

So we were building this multidimensional model, which was increasingly filled with information, not on the 3d stuff, but, you know, all kinds of evidence about that particular event. And connected together, the, those pieces of media were, were helping us to understand the events at Babyn Yar better. So that, that's how we started the process and how it evolved through time. We actually haven't finished that process and we were still involved in this work right before the war.

On, on what Linda just said about negation, we also went further to study that. So after this massacre, there was a major concentration camp. It was located directly across the street from Babyn Yar. It had both male and female sections, and the laborers of this camp, in the end of German occupation of Kyiv, were ordered to go to Babyn Yar, dig up all these human remains and burn them, which is an extremely laborious operation that took over a month. And there's again a lot of evidence about that. So that's a first, the first time when you see on this specific site, this kind of violent attempt to cover up for the war crime.

And indeed, as Linda said, you can, we know that directly after the war there were journalists, there was an attempt to investigate this, there were, there was a treatment of this site in the beginning, arguably, which, which the site deserves because there was also a design competition for the memorial directly. And it wasn't immediately that Soviet Union decided that this is an unconvenient story for them, to address these national kinds of questions that arose here.

And yeah, then basically we'll, the, the last chapter of our research was focused on this shift towards this idea that actually this story is not very kind of positive. The city needs to grow and these ravines are on the way of the city growth. These are, this is kind of the language that the witnesses that we interviewed or read their, their testimonies said. And you know, that chapter is basically about this whole territory being terraformed with, kind of building these soil dams and filling, filling their ravines with liquid soil, which came as a byproduct of a brick factory nearby.

So we studied that chapter as well. And, you know, I mean, it's, you, you would imagine that there's no kind of like, not any more room for horrible things to happen here, but of course, when, when Soviets tried to fill the ravines with this liquid mud, one of the dams broke through and, you know, destroyed basically the whole area downstream from Babyn Yar, which is known in history of Kyiv as a Kurenivka mudslide.

So this story in these three chapters of, you know, the events of the occupation themselves, the concentration camps, and the attempt to cover up for the war crimes and the erasure of Babyn Yar. Those three chapters were the main kinds of territories where we conducted our research.

Tyler McBrien: And Linda, correct me if I'm wrong, but around this time, I believe you began reporting on, on the efforts to build a memorial and to memorialize the site. How did you become involved in, or interested in rather, Babyn Yar? And maybe how did you first interact with, with Maksym and his work?

Linda Kinstler: Yeah, well, I don't remember the first time that I went to Babyn Yar. It must have been like 2014 about when I kind of first going, started going to Ukraine more regularly.

But I had all, I, you know, I had also always known about the site. My mother's family is from Ukraine and so I always knew that we had lost some members of the family there. And so, you know, first I wanted to go see it just because it was part of this family history. And then I started getting interested in what was going on there right now, particularly in this kind of post-Maidan movement.

There were, you know, in the beginning of the BYHMC, where they were really thinking seriously about what should be there, how it should be honored, and also how it should coexist with the life that has, you know, had sprung up around it in part because of what the Soviets had built there, right? So every time you go to Babyn Yar, you, you walk right by the TV tower, you walk by, right by the TV station which is where, you know, journalists were actively working. And, you know, there, it was kind of part of the fabric of the city. And so that's how I kind of started getting interested in, you know, how you think through this history in this new chapter for Ukraine, where it was, you know, trying to become what it is now, which is a candidate member of the European Union, and what that would mean for its relation to its own history.

And I, you know, had the great pleasure of meeting Maksym in Kyiv when I was less than in September to kind of report on the grand unveiling of many, many years of work by the foundation, you know, with different people at its home to actually make this a place with what they thought would be, you know, a fitting series of memorials and like, you know, different museums such that you couldn't, you couldn't navigate the space without being aware of what would happen. And I do think they were successful in that in some ways, even though, of course, there's like very many critiques that you could levy against what was built there.

You know, I think one of the things that's interesting about Babyn Yar is and why that poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko keeps coming up, right? ‘No Monument Stands Over Babyn Yar’ is because it kind of has remained somehow correct in different ways in the many decades since it was written. You know, when it was released first, of course it was banned. And then as more memorials came up, you know, each memorial was dedicated to a different group of people. And it didn't, you know, it didn't unify the crimes that had occurred there or really contextualize them. And I think that's what Maksym was helping to work on in thinking through like, okay, first we need to ensure that people understand what happened there. And I think, you know, part of what's interesting if you think about this war is that so much is unknown and it takes so many decades because there are these crimes of negation that deliberately try to obstruct truth.

And so Maksym's work is kind of an effort to fill in those gaps, which I think is extremely valuable. And of course the Yevtushenko poem now it's like absolutely chilling to think about because it literally interrupted one of the biggest memorial efforts at this site. Which up to that point really hadn't been adequately considered, you know, of course by historians it had been, but not certainly not by the general public.

Tyler McBrien: I definitely want to get into soon how the invasion in particular and the, and the war has imbued the site with, with renewed significance. But first, Maksym, I'm, I'm curious, you know, how your investigation or how you continued your investigation and how it shifted after the invasion.

Maksym Rokmaniko: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a difficult question because in the way, I mean, that shift is almost subconscious. You know, we were still in Kyiv when the first missiles started to land. And there was, just as the sense that there is nothing else we can do, we were just mapping and trying to understand things to the degree at which we could. We've developed a lot of tools during the work on Babyn Yar that we could now use to structure information about these attacks now and to better understand them.

So the repertoire of, of tools that we used for Babyn Yar, which include maps, you know, like understanding the topography, the 3D connected with 2D images, working with witness testimonies, all of that is, is highly useful for us now. In a way that the work that we, we, we work on now is still very much kind of trying to find shape because we're moving from this kind of academic research where we had no incentive and no need to communicate about our research because it was done on the commission of this foundation that also had a massive infrastructure to tell the stories about this and to kind of work with media outlets.

One, one complicated aspect for us now is that we have to also find a way to tell these stories about our investigations. And this is something that we're trying to figure out. But on the other hand, the very nature of the work and the type of research that we do which looks at this very specific locations. And basically kind of, through them tries to see the history of that place and the entanglement of forces that actually historically oftentimes explain the war now, you know. And, and then those, those, those investigations fast forward to this very small fragment of time when a missile lands to the site or it destroys a building. And that specific, specific moment, we also try to analyze it in as high of resolution as possible. So identifying weapons, trying to understand who was in that site before the, before the explosion, you know, trying to understand what time that attack took place and so on.

Linda Kinstler: Yeah. And if I can add, basically what happened was, you know, Maksym and I met because I was reporting on his work and the work of the BYHMC more broadly. But then, you know, obviously we were talking and I happen to have studied with Forensic Architecture and have a degree from their master's program. And, you know, had spent a year kind of immersing myself in the stakes and goals of this new way of kind of treating evidence, generating evidence, dealing with kind of digital instances of crimes.

And FA, Forensic Architecture, does produce these kind of really robust investigations, which are all available on their website. And then works with, works to submit them to courts for evidence. And so I had gone from there and then really started to think about, you know, okay, standards of proof that are used in international criminal proceedings, both historically and in the present. And so once this kind of invasion became what it is now, that's when we kind of revisited this question of the missile strike and started kind of thinking through okay, how do you present it now that everything has changed?

Maksym Rokmaniko: Yeah, I mean, I probably should have, should have mentioned FA, FA stuff before, but I mean, that's, I mean, it's important to say that the tools that we used for Babin Yar investigation was in a big way informed by the work of Forensic Architecture. And I've kind of always been aware of their work and I've met many of their collaborators. And, you know, for Babyn Yar, when we were quite deep in the research process, I had a first call when we basically asked for a crit from Eyal Weizman, who's the director of Forensic Architecture. So we knew each other through the Babyn Yar research that we did.

And I think Eyal was quite happy to see tools of Forensic Architecture kind of modified and supplied with some kind of weirder touch from our side and also applied to historic material, applied also in a completely different unexpected geography for, for, for them. So, I mean, it was fun, I guess, for them to see that someone in Ukraine is taking up their tools and working on, on Babyn Yar with this. But then, of course, when the first missiles landed in Kyiv, and we were actually evacuating from, from Kyiv on the 25th of February. And that is the moment where I got a text message from Eyal, who was asking if there's anything, and if there's anything, any help that we would need. And from that quick call we basically, you know, kind of step by step established a collaboration that is a framework in which we do these investigations now as well. So the work on these sites that we, we look at in quite a lot of detail is done in collaboration with Forensic Architecture and they also kindly host us in their office here in Berlin.

Tyler McBrien: So I understand that you just released your first sort of inaugural investigation in this collaboration. Could you tell me a bit about what's next with this collaboration? You know, what, what future investigations you have planned? And then perhaps a bit about what your goal is with this. Is it, is it collecting evidence for, for war crimes tribunals or, or is it something farther reaching or, or longer term?

Maksym Rokmaniko: I mean, as I said, the work is somehow still developing and we, we kind of modifying the, the results of these investigations as soon as we publish them. There are some things that we want to add and so on. There are three major directions that we are focusing on right now. The first one being something that we already published about, which is the Kyiv TV Tower strike. But we also want to look a bit deeper into the general nature of war over telecommunication networks.

And this is something that seems quite important for the war, both in a military sense and in the sense of how people perceive these events. So, so this thread of trying to understand the war through these bombings of TV towers, communication networks and even, you know, things like in Mariupol, bringing these massive cars with screens that basically report Russian national TV, things like that. They all come in, in this thread about kind of this specific manifestation of information war, which has to do with infrastructure through which these news are circulating.

The second case that we are looking at is Mariupol theatre, and that is the most kind of, like, typical for Forensic Architecture investigation where there is one major war crime, which seems to be so outrageous and it seems like it's clear what happened there. But there's still a lot of work necessary to disprove the claims that Russia have about what exactly happened and to tell what exactly happened on that site, how exactly the theater was exploded, who was there, how many people, how were they hoping to get evacuated and so on. So the story about Mariupol theater and it's kind of, yeah, basically that is, that is the other topics that we are investigating right now.

The third topic that we are currently looking at is, has to do with this whole conversation about the wheat crisis and the, the, the breakage of supply chains of export of Ukrainian wheat that also echoes and covers many different kind of like, pains that Ukrainians had over centuries. It kind of very strongly echoes the famines that were orchestrated by Soviet Union in the 1930s. And yeah, I mean, that one is also quite straightforward in terms of technically just trying to understand where wheat is produced in Ukraine, what are the supply chains of its export, and basically how the frontline cuts through those supply chains, blocks the ports, and what are the implications of that.

So these three research kind of directions that we are now working on, that each of them has a twofold aim. And one aspect is, as you mentioned, a collection of evidence. So, as we know from Babyn Yar case, it's not only that we will be able to, in as much of detail, gather materials about these kind of like topics. It's also when we put them together and cross reference them, when we understand where some pictures are taken, when we understand what witness testimonies mean in their testimonies, when they explain how certain space was occupied. When we connect these different pieces of evidence, we can better understand these events and basically produce new knowledge about what exactly happened there.

But other than using these, these materials in judiciary procedures, we also hope to just generally be able to communicate more about what exactly happens in Ukraine. This historic dimension is important to us to look at in, in other cases, not just Babyn Yar in these other, other, other topics that we are studying, because we have a feeling that it's really important to understand the history of the struggle and the fact that it's not new. It's not, it didn't happen overnight. These imperial forces basically can be recognized centuries if you look at each of these locations, irrespectively whether that is Kyiv, Mariupol, or Mykolaiv, where the, you know, the infrastructure for wheat storage was, was, was bombed also quite recently. So yeah, I mean, that, that is more or less the, the, the aim, the twofold aim and the three directions that we're currently working on.

Tyler McBrien: As we near the end of our conversation, Linda, I'm curious, you know, as someone who's thought deeply about memory and negation, memorialization. How have your thoughts on these themes changed through your reporting on the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center now through the invasion and, and working with, or reporting on Maksym's investigations rather in general?

Linda Kinstler: Yeah. I mean, I think that's a hard question to answer right now as everything is still ongoing. But, you know, I think what Maksym was saying really illustrates how there are so many things that you can discover through the kind of forensic methodology, right? There are so many things that are occluded that can be revealed. There are negations that you can attempt to reduce or fill in, but of course there's a limit, right? And so I'm always really concerned with thinking about how much we should or could be relying on these methods and when they might lead us astray.

And yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting to see right now because even as, you know, cities in Ukraine are still being destroyed, people are still dying. And we don't know when this will end or kind of, you know, obviously what the scale of destruction will be, that we still have this kind of desire to think about what the memorials will look like. How will we rebuild? What should we rebuild? And I think that what Maksym's work can illustrate is, you know, the networks that enabled this to happen and this kind of, I think one of the ways it can be most impactful is that, you know, it kind of brings this deep history to the floor.

And one of the challenges if you're working in this space is, of course, we all want to have hope that there will be justice, that there will be tribunals, that there will be trials that will bring people to account. You know, we're already seeing that the Ukrainian prosecutors are commencing their own proceedings, you know, as, of course, are Russian authorities, right? And you need to think about, first of all, okay, those proceedings will be limited in scope. We're unlikely to see, you know, this kind of grand tribunal, although, of course, there are, you know, hopes and dreams for that. But you also need to think about how do you tell the narrative of this war, right?

Where law fails, we look to literature, we look to narrative, we look to media, we look to this kind of consensus about what exactly has unfurled. And so I think that is one of the places where I'm turning now because unfortunately, you know, I have become, I guess I would say, less faithful in the possibilities of the different juridical systems that are kind of currently operating, but who knows, you know, I could be completely wrong.

And I hope that what Maksym is uncovering across Ukraine specifically, you know, in the three case studies that he just outlined will be extremely helpful to the lawyers that are kind of already working on these cases. But I also think, you know, equally importantly will be, how do we think about presenting these to the general public, both domestically in Ukraine and in Russia and, you know, further than that. So. Yeah, we'll see. It's a hard question.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah. I think where law fails is actually the perfect place to end this conversation for the Lawfare Podcast. I want to thank you both so much for, for taking the time with, with everything going on. We really appreciate it.

Linda Kinstler: Thank you so much.

Maksym Rokmaniko: Thank you.

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