Iryna Venediktova says her purpose is to make Vladimir Putin and his forces pay for their war crimes in Ukraine. For Venediktova, the country's prosecutor general, this is personal.
The first woman to serve as Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Venediktova speaks with steely resolve and occasional humor, and approaches her task with a relentless work ethic.
“The main functions of the law are to protect and to compensate. I hope that we can do it, because now it’s just beautiful words, no more rule of law,” Venediktova says. “It’s very beautiful words. I want them to work.”On a Tuesday morning, Venediktova marches up to a thick line of refugees waiting in the chill sun to register at a district administration building in Lviv. Her security detail, armed and dressed in black, hovers as she stepped into the crowd of women and children.
Interviews can take hours. Bent over laptops, prosecutors wait out people’s tears to ask what the shelling sounded like, what kind of spray munitions made on impact. They ask what uniforms, what insignia soldiers wore. This is the raw material of accountability, the first link in a chain of responsibility Venediktova hopes to connect all the way to Russia’s leadership.
Venediktova knows these roads well. She rides them endlessly back and forth to meet foreign officials who don’t dare venture into a country at war. “We have to confront this,” Williamson says. “There’s a need to show that countries are determined to stand up for international humanitarian law and hold people so flagrantly violating it accountable.”
In the course of a five-hour interview, prosecutor Stanislav Bronevytskyy takes Verstiouk’s statement. “She can remember every detail, each minute and second,” he says.Vast swaths of Ukraine have been transformed into potential crime scenes. Each day, the tragedies multiply, creating an insurmountable pile of facts that must be established and saved.
Venediktova has been building alliances with human rights groups – some of which have a history of antagonism with Ukrainian authorities -- and an often-distrustful public.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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