‘US peace deal must punish Russian war crimes,’ says Ukraine’s Nobel peace prize winner Oleksandra Matviichuk

Ukraine’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Oleksandra Matviichuk has said that Russia must be punished for war crimes, and any peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine that includes an amnesty for war crimes could encourage other authoritarian leaders to attack their neighbours. Matviichuk said the leaked 28-point US-Russia plan did not account for “the human dimension” and she supported President Volodymyr Zelensky’s efforts to rewrite it in dialogue with the White House.

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

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Matviichuk is the head of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, which was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.

She 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.

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The clause has been dropped from the Ukraine-US 19-point counterproposal, but negotiations will continue into next week, when Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, visits Moscow for talks.

“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,” she said.

Ukraine “deserves to be a part of Nato” and can make a strong contribution to the alliance with its enforced military experience, she added.

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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.

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.