The Lawfare Podcast: Oleksandra Matviychuk on Documenting Russian War Crimes in Ukraine

Oleksandra Matviychuk is the head of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine. She founded the organization to work on internal reform in her own country, but for the last eight years, she has spent a great deal of her time investigating and documenting Russian war crimes. She began this in the wake of the 2014 Russian invasion of the Donbas and Crimea, but the work has really accelerated since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of this year. While in Washington to talk to U.S. policymakers about her vision of a hybrid tribunal to try Russian war crimes, she took some time to speak with Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes. It's a wide-ranging conversation covering her own history as a war crimes investigator and documenter, the current challenge of documenting and prosecuting Russian war crimes on a scale we haven't seen in a very long time, and how the Ukrainian war effort relates to the project of defending civilians and preventing further war crimes.