Making peace with Russia now would be surrender, Ukrainian winner of Nobel Peace Prize says

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Oleksandra Matviichuk finds herself in the awkward position of being a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who believes now is not the time for her country to seek peace.

The suggestion that Ukraine should allow Russia to retain some or all the territories it has captured, in exchange for a halt in the fighting, has recently gained traction among some of Ukraine’s allies in the West.

Both the U.S. and Germany are reported to have nudged President Volodymyr Zelensky to be more open to a negotiated settlement, and opinion polls in Ukraine suggest that the idea is becoming slightly more palatable here too. Support for negotiation rose to 19 per cent from 10 per cent between May and December of last year as the second anniversary of the war approaches, though the vast majority still oppose any territorial concessions.

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Ms. Matviichuk heads the Centre for Civil Liberties, a human-rights group that in 2022 became the first Ukrainian recipient of the prestigious Nobel Prize for advancing the cause of international peace. The Ukrainians won the prize alongside Memorial, a Russian human-rights organization and Ales Bialiatski, a Belarussian dissident.

But Ms. Matviichuk says that any deal that leaves Russian troops occupying Ukrainian land is no peace at all. “Peace doesn’t come when a country that was invaded stops fighting. Because it’s not a peace, it’s occupation,” Ms. Matviichuk told The Globe and Mail in an interview at a café in the trendy Podil neighbourhood of Kyiv.

She said she and the Centre for Civil Liberties had learned through a decade of dealing with human-rights cases in Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine that life in those regions was anything but peaceful. Russia illegally seized and annexed the strategic Crimean Peninsula in 2014, and Russian-backed forces have ruled parts of the southeastern Donbas region since the same year.

“I can confidently tell that occupation is just another form of the war. It’s not better than war, because people in occupied territories live in a grey zone without any possibilities to defend their rights, their freedom, their property and their beloved ones,” Ms. Matviichuk said. “Occupation is horrible. Occupation is not just changing one state flag to another, occupation means enforced disappearances, rapes, torture, filtration camps, denial of your identity, forcible adoption of your own children, mass graves.”

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Ms. Matviichuk’s support for her country’s war effort makes her organization’s place on the list of Nobel Peace Prize laureates somewhat incongruous. Many previous winners, including Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, won the award after advocating that their peoples stop fighting and enter peace talks.

But Ms. Matviichuk also isn’t quite onside with Mr. Zelensky’s position that there can be no negotiations until the last Russian soldier leaves Ukraine. The problem, Ms. Matviichuk acknowledges, is that it’s far from clear when and if Ukraine will be able to free the lands that Russia has taken. While 2022 ended with a burst of optimism after Ukrainian troops liberated the eastern Kharkiv region and the southern city of Kherson, 2023 was marked by a failed Ukrainian counteroffensive that left the front lines almost unchanged.

Rather than endless war, Ms. Matviichuk said she could envision a series of interim measures that resulted in the gradual departure of Russian troops. “But we have to set our goal clearly. If we want to restore international order, we have to sooner or later de-occupy all territories, probably using different tools, not just military.”

The 40-year-old lawyer and civic activist says Russia’s invasion of Ukraine illustrates how the post-Second World War international system has collapsed into an era of lawlessness where might makes right. Unless aggressor states like Russia are stopped, and their leaders punished, she forecasts that the number of wars will grow.

She pointed specifically to Azerbaijan’s 2023 decision to use force to reclaim the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, which was inhabited by ethnic Armenians and had been under Armenian military control since a 1990s war, as well as Venezuela’s recent moves to escalate tensions with Guyana.

“As a lawyer, there is a very visible answer that the international system of peace and security is broken … now that’s become obvious for all people. And that’s why we will see such wars and conflicts, more and more often,” she said.

“Azerbaijan, for years, tried to solve this territorial dispute with Armenia. And then when [Azeri President Ilham Aliyev] understood that this international system is not working, and he can do what he wanted, he solved this problem with force, with brutal force.

“Now we hear that the President of Venezuela organized this referendum and said he will occupy part of neighbouring country Guyana, also because he understood that nobody will stop him.”

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Ms. Matviichuk put the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel – and Israel’s subsequent invasion of the Gaza Strip – on the same list. She said the solution to the conflict there was the same as in Ukraine: a return to internationally recognized borders and for all sides to respect international law.

What’s currently absent, she said, was any kind of enforcement mechanism that could give meaning to the rulings of bodies like the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICC has issued a warrant for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin over the forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia, but few expect Mr. Putin to ever face trial in The Hague.

Similarly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that his government will ignore any interim measures – such as calling for a halt to the attack on Gaza – that the ICJ might order while it considers a case brought by South Africa that accuses Israel of “acts or omissions” that are “genocidal in character” against Palestinian residents of Gaza.

Ms. Matviichuk says the world order established after the end of the Second World War has crumbled, with the key flaw being the veto power given to five countries – the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France – at the United Nations Security Council. While such a system may have made sense in 1945, today it puts those countries, and any allies they choose to protect, beyond international law, thus weakening the entire system.

“This war in the Middle East, this Russian war against Ukraine, is just a reflection of the negative global trend,” Ms. Matviichuk said. “Such kind of wars will appear more and more often in different parts of the world, because the system, the wiring, is broken.”

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The wiring snapped, she said, during Russia’s brutal wars in the 1990s and early 2000s to stamp out the independence movement in its southern region of Chechnya. The global community looked away, rather than seeking to punish the Kremlin, and the concept of international law was badly diminished.

Reversing the trend, Ms. Matviichuk said, would require the emergence of “leaders with historical responsibility” who were committed to doing the right thing, rather than being blown around by the winds of populism.

But while she doesn’t see any such leaders on the scene right now, she said she also has no intention to enter politics herself, but will instead continue working to build Ukrainian civil society.

“I want to be a good partner for politicians with a sense of historical responsibility. It will be my role.”

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