US deal must punish Russia war crimes, says Ukraine’s Nobel peace prize winner

Oleksandra Matviichuk warns any amnesty could encourage authoritarian leaders to attack their neighbours

Any peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine that includes an amnesty for war crimes could encourage other authoritarian leaders to attack their neighbours, Ukraine’s only Nobel peace prize winner has warned.

Oleksandra Matviichuk said the leaked 28-point US-Russia plan did not account for “the human dimension” and she supported President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s efforts to rewrite it in dialogue with White House.

“We need a peace, but not a pause that provides Russia a chance to retreat and regroup,” the Kyiv-based human rights lawyer said. A durable settlement must include Nato-like guarantees for Ukraine, she added.

Matviichuk is the head of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, which was jointly awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2022, and she has been influential in arguing that Russia has developed a “genocidal character” because the international community has not restrained it enough.

Comments such as hers reflect widespread sentiment in Ukraine. Even after nearly four years of attritional fighting, with power cuts frequently following Russian attacks, there is little appetite to accept territorial concessions, and few Ukrainians believe there can be a permanent end to the war without an effective security framework.

The human rights lawyer argued that clause 26 of the initial US-Russia proposal, which said: “All parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to make any claims or consider any complaints in the future,” was particularly problematic.

“It would ruin international law and the UN Charter [which urges refraining from attacks on neighbours] to create a precedent that would encourage other authoritarian leaders, that you can invade a country, kill people and erase their identity, and you will be rewarded with new territories,” she said.

It has been dropped from the Ukraine-US 19-point counter proposal but negotiations will continue into next week, when Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, visits Moscow for talks with Russian leaders. Kremlin officials insist there will be no changes, raising fears the US may try to impose Russian terms on Ukraine.

Conceding Kramatorsk, Sloviansk and the 30% of the eastern Donetsk region still under Ukrainian control, as Russia has demanded in its 28 points, would not necessarily provide a stable basis for peace, Matviichuk argued, because “Putin did not start this war for land”.

The Russian president’s goal was to subjugate Ukraine, she said. “It’s naive to think Putin lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers for tiny Ukrianian cities which the majority of Russians couldn’t find on the map.” A peace plan would succeed only if it was “impossible for him to achieve his goal”.

Ukraine, she argued, “deserves to be a part of Nato”, able to make a strong contribution to the alliance with its enforced military experience. If that was not possible politically, then only “a complex of measures which will have the same power as Nato’s article 5” would deter Russia from attacking Ukraine again.

Matviichuk said a peace agreement should also protect the rights of an estimated 6 million Ukrainians living in Russian-occupied territories, including 1.5 million children. “Russian occupation means torture, rape, filtration camps and mass graves, yet there are zero words about these people,” in the 28-point plan, she said.

Leaked copies of the initial US-Russia text make only a hazy reference to Ukrainians living under occupation. It says both countries should “abolish all discriminatory measures and guarantee the rights of Ukrainian and Russian media and education”.

The CCL has helped document 92,178 “probable war crimes” by Russian actors in Ukraine since 2014, when Moscow ordered the invasion of Crimea and separatists took control of parts of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Full-scale fighting erupted in February 2022 with the Russian invasion.

Though Ukraine remains under pressure militarily, with Russian forces advancing at points in the east and south, its armies are not defeated and there is a widespread belief that they can continue to inflict heavy losses on the invaders and eventually force a reassessment, despite the human cost.

Inna Sovsun, an opposition MP from the liberal Holos party, said giving up the rest of Donetsk without a fight was “one of the most unacceptable conditions in the current discussions” and that Ukraine had to alter it in its diplomatic talks with the US.

“For Russia to seize Donetsk militarily, it would need roughly a year of extremely intense fighting”, she said, and it would sustain many casualties in the process. “Russia currently lacks the capability to take these areas, and conceding them would only create a new staging ground for future attacks.”

Russia is close to taking control of Pokrovsk, a once militarily important coal-mining town in Donetsk, after a protracted 15-month battle. Its military has sustained about 1,000 casualties a day since June, according to UK estimates, across all fronts, though the most intense fighting has been in the region.

Halyna Yanchenko, an independent MP formerly from the president’s Servant of the People party, said “Ukrainians want peace more than anyone” but that “after 11 years of war, we know exactly what peace on Russia’s terms looks like”.

She added that the president, politicians such as her and the country had no choice but to engage with the US. “All of us are working together to explain our position, counter Russian lobbying and disinformation, and make sure the US doesn’t accept Russian demands. Because that would undo years of diplomatic effort.”