but later i found out that when you live in ukraine, legal knowledge is not enough, it is in switzerland. if you have a strong legal position, you can come to court and you have every chance to defend your right in court in ukraine. being a human rights defender or being a human rights defender means that in addition to legal knowledge, you must have other knowledge, you must understand how to run information companies, you must at least be oriented in the basics of human psychology in order to talk to people who have suffered from the most terrible crimes. you must know how the international system works in order to plan advocacy campaigns, you have to find the energy that you have to breathe into this

international system that is not working in order for it to start moving in the right direction but the most important thing is even the lack of skills no, this is strength of spirit and my lecture in the next part i would i wanted to dedicate it to worldviews because it was the strength of the ukrainian spirit that helped us endure and helps us continue to fight against russian aggression at a time when, after the beginning of a full-scale invasion, not only russia, but even the civilized world were convinced that ukraine would not stand. this strength of the ukrainian spirit

determines our future victory, whenever it happens, we were the first human rights organization that sent mobile groups to document war crimes in february , march 2014 in crimea, donetsk, luhansk region and i have been documenting war crimes for 9 years after the beginning of full-scale russian aggression, we encountered an unprecedented number of war crimes, but i always i say that we are documenting not just violations of the hague or geneva conventions, we are documenting human pain from here and the shootings of

evacuation corridors from here and the creation by russia of a system of filtration camps from here, the targeted destruction of residential buildings, churches, schools, hospitals from here, murders, rapes, torture and abduction of civilians in the occupied territories because russia uses war crimes as a method of waging this war, it is trying to break our resistance and occupy ukraine through unspeakable the suffering of the civilian population and we document this suffering so that sooner

or later putin and the higher political leadership of the russian federation, the higher military command of the russian federation, as well as all russians who committed these crimes with their own hands , were punished. i often asked myself in the first years of the war, where did such cruelty come from? that i worked with people who survived captivity and they told terrible things. they told how they were beaten, how they were raped, how they were put in wooden boxes, whose limbs were cut off, who were forced to write with their own blood

one woman told me how she would be treated as an okoloshka, but this cruelty, which is part of russian culture, is not accidental. i remember a well-known sociological experiment that is quite cruel when an animal seems to be a dog. electric current and eventually it led to a situation when this poor animal decided to die of hunger in terrible agony but no longer fight for its survival and for its life and this experiment

called learned helplessness, so it seems to me that the russians are now conducting this terrible experiment on the entire ukrainian people, they want to inflict so much pain on us that we simply cannot resist, but they miscalculated because if you look at any sociological survey where ukrainians are asked about their values ​​on the first the value of freedom always stands first, and this is the worldview that is the basis of the ukrainian spirit, and now in this war with the russian federation, we are fighting for freedom

in all senses, because values ​​are what determine our behavior not when it is easy for us, but when it is difficult for us and like our time ukrainian dissidents so now and today we pay the highest price for our values ​​in this struggle for freedom we stand not only on the shoulders of our predecessors and in general this struggle lasted for centuries we we stand on our practical experience and i want to share several stories that are vital and important for me. the first story is the story of the creation of the euromaidan sos initiative, which i launched with my team in response to the brutal

beating of a peaceful student demonstration on maidan then we worked 24 hours a day , we united several thousand people all over the country and every day hundreds of people who were beaten, arrested, tortured , accused of fabricated criminal or administrative cases passed through our hands and this was the moment when we spoke out against the entire state cars because paramilitary groups aunts cooperated with prosecutors prosecutors cooperated with the courts the former president the government the majority of the parliament they were against the peaceful protest they wanted it to destroy even physically and at that moment it was

very easy to say well what can i do the law does not work and give up but due to the fact that our volunteers and our lawyers fought very honestly for each person for each procedural means in the end we started working not just on legal a on the symbolic level, where ideas are born and meanings come, and every person on the maidan knew that there are no guarantees in our lives, you can be arrested , you can be kidnapped, you can be killed in the end, but there are people who will fight for you who will never leave you, and this understanding gave strength to overcome fear, so we are the first. the life lesson is that even

when your efforts and your struggle for freedom and human dignity seem meaningless because of the enormous force that opposes you, you must continue to fight and the result even unexpectedly, but surely, a second life story will come - this is the story of the euro initiative, this is the story of the global campaign save oleg sentsov, which i and my team launched when the famous ukrainian director oleg sentsov started a hunger strike, he announced a hunger strike being on the outskirts of the north of the russian federation, vlabytnanga, having no connection with the outside world, he demanded the release of all ukrainian political prisoners. we decided to

make his voice heard and for this we united people in more than 35 countries of the world in a global action and we started this a global action of simultaneous demonstrations when in 35 countries of the world people came out on the central square and with demands not to the abstract putin but to their own national governments that they should do to release oleg sentsov and other ukrainian political prisoners, in the end it had meaning and effect, and the fact that oleg sentsov and 34 other people returned home in september 2019 was a huge contribution of these hundreds and hundreds of people around the world who supported the global action and joined the collective actions, but this began a

one-man action from oleg sentsov, who, i will remind you , was in prison in the far north of the russian federation, who had nothing else among the tools, only his word and his own position , so my second life lesson is that even if we have nothing to fight nothing more than a word. and the actual position must be applied, because the word and one's own position are not so small in the end, and my third lesson is about people, when the full-scale invasion began, we all witnessed how international organizations, even humanitarian ones, evacuated their employees from ukraine or

a safer oblast and ordinary people remained and ordinary people began to do extraordinary things ordinary people helped others survive under russian fire ordinary people organized evacuations from cities and towns surrounded by russian troops ordinary people pulled people out of the ruins of residential buildings ordinary people helped to survive in bomb shelters and supported each other in conditions where there was no medical care, no water, no dialectic, no light. i would not wish anyone to go through this experience, but these dramatic times gave us the opportunity to

show our best features to be brave to fight for freedom to make difficult but correct decisions to support each other is possible now more than ever before we feel acutely what it means to be human and i know that many ordinary people are quite humble evaluate their contribution to the protection of our freedom and democratic choice. because there is a huge force that opposes us, and that is why i appeal to this image that was created on the maidan when ukrainian artists created a poster like a drop in the ocean. maybe our efforts are a drop, but it is a drop in the ocean. ocean and

this means that i, despite the fact that i cannot stop this war by my own efforts, but without my efforts, nothing will change for sure, and the third lesson i learned from this experience is that when you cannot rely on legal instruments you can always rely on people because people have much more influence than they think for themselves and the mass mobilization of people in different countries of the world can change world history faster than the intervention of the un and i would like to dwell on a very important question the question what are we fighting for because this war did not start in february

2022, this war started in february 2014 , when ukraine got a chance for a quick democratic transformation, and in order to stop us on this path, putin started this war and occupied crimea, part of luhansk because putin is not afraid of the donetsk regions, putin is afraid of the idea of ​​freedom, which has moved closer to the russian borders, so a victory for ukraine is not just to knock out russian troops outside our territory, to restore international order, to liberate crimea and other regions under temporary

russian occupation, a victory for ukraine is to achieve success and carry out the democratic transformation of our country, and we must remember that this is a difficult job even in peacetime. what can be said during a war when there is a full-scale invasion and this war is killing people of a central character and we all feel the threat of survival very acutely, but we do not have the luxury of postponing this task of democratic transformation of the country until the war ends, and of course during any war there is a temptation to become a mirror of the other side, especially when this side ignores international law and despises the decision of international

organizations is precisely why it is necessary to clearly remember why we are fighting to win this war and turn ourselves into russia there is no sense and i would like to remind the international partners present here what we are for together we are fighting this war, which is not a war between two countries, but a war between two systems , authoritarianism and democracy, because putin wants to convince the whole world, not only ukrainians, that democracy, human rights and the rule of law are fake values, because they do not protect anyone during the war protect and we have to respond something to this valuable dimension

of this civilizational confrontation, and for this we have to do two things. first, you have lived in luca for a long time, that we have an international system of peace and security. ukraine is a vivid example that this international system does not work because when the secretary general of the un arrives in kyiv to meet with president zelensky on this very day, a russian rocket hits a residential building and kills our journalist colleague vira hyrych in her own apartment, and it turns out that we live in a world where our security and respect for human rights do not depend on international order, and how powerful the military potential is in the country where a person lives, and this needs to be changed, we need to

start a radical reform of the international peace and security system, and the start of this reform should be an important symbolic step, we have expel russia and betray the un security council for systematic violations of the charter and the second thing that we have to do together in order to show that the rule of law, democracy and human rights work, we must demonstrate justice, we must seek justice, especially since there will be no sustainable peace in our region without

justice where russia has been using war for decades as a method of achieving geopolitical interests, and war crimes as a way to win this war, and now that we have faced a huge number of war crimes crimes that even the best legal system in the world cannot digest we need international support we need to create an international tribunal and bring putin lukashenko and other war criminals to justice then we will be able to say and be very honest about it that this was the period when nothing worked when no legal mechanisms could stop russian aggression

and even human rights defenders and nobel peace laureates turned to various countries and asked for modern weapons, but we solved this problem, we attracted putin and others russian war criminals to be held accountable and put an end to it. i would like to

address the citizens of ukraine. transformation is not just the adoption of the right laws or the creation of new institutions, and with the right signposts , society's values ​​are still stronger. therefore, we need to change our way of thinking and bring more into our worldview from a human rights perspective, otherwise we can once again repeat the story when we once again struggle with authoritarian regimes, achieve success, overcome these authoritarian regimes, and then we cannot do our homework and build stable democratic institutions where our children would not

have to go through this struggle again and again it's as if all these years we were under the power of the effect when it was described by angus madison , he studied the transformation of countries and he determined that there are countries that seem to be trying to modernize but are head-butting in an invisible rock and fall, slide down and end up on the same trajectory again. therefore, we need to make a leap to get out of this zone of turbulence, which ukraine has been in for decades, too high a price, we are now paying only for the chance to build a country in which the rights of every person are protected, the government is accountable and under control the courts are fair and

independent, and the police do not beat students who go out for a peaceful student demonstration, and this is our responsibility with you, i constantly remind myself of this story from the maidan when after the shootings, relatives of the victims of the heavenly hundred spoke at the courts. and i think many of you remember the 19-year-old student roman gurik, such a curly-haired, nice guy who was killed on instytutskaya street, and i listened to his mother in court. it was very difficult to listen because his mother told how already after the death of

her son, they brought a backpack, and in this backpack she found a candy wrapper, and she said in court that her romchyk was a very polite child, so he kept the candy wrappers and did not throw them out on the street, but what i love most what struck her was what she said as a mother. she didn't want her son to go to the maidan. well, because like any mother , she was afraid for his life and his health, but she remembered how 10 years before that she herself stood on the orange maidan and she said that she simply had no moral right to object to him and i want to wish us all that our generation will be the last

generation that has to fight for freedom , democracy, human rights and other values ​​of western civilization for such a high price, we must take this responsibility upon ourselves we are not we have to transfer this responsibility to our children, thank you very much oleksandr i thank you very much and on behalf of the kyiv security forum on behalf of everyone present i want to thank you please sit down i want to

thank you for your mission sverstyukov mission i want to thank you for your word because i think that we all we hear in this word the mighty and invincible power of our people, you said that our generation should be the last to choose freedom and democracy, may our generation be present here, all our people will be the first generation to win for me today it is a great honor to tell about the very important guests who also came to this event , these are the guests who are a symbol of our resistance, these are the heroes, these are the soldiers of azov, the soldiers of azov, allow me to introduce the guests who came to

us, this is captain ivan ignat ignatiev, the deputy commander of the azov regiment, this is junior lieutenant ilya gendal in samoilenko, performing the duties of the deputy commander of the detachment, this is senior sergeant mykhailo dianov and among us kateryna prokopenko wife of radish wife of the hero of ukraine denys prokopenko i invite kateryna to speak and invite you to join 86 days of the defense of mariupol, 25 days of captivity, the azov regiment and other units that defended the city and later the last fort-post a with avstal, the fight for ukraine, for her children, for the values ​​of life, for the

freedom of ukraine, the fight against equals , experiencing the forces of the enemy, which destroys everything in its path and our warriors with the overwhelming spirit of victory, love for the fatherland, who reduce the number of weapons, did the impossible by drawing all the enemy forces on themselves and giving other cities time to prepare, our soldiers made a great sacrifice so that we could being here with you, we can talk for a long time about gilded russia, mariupol, just imagine that all the crimes of the world have been localized, looting, violence, the use of civilian qualities of the shield, the introduction of fire on civilian and critical objects, the killing of prisoners of war on the spot, for example, see the confirmed fact of azov, dan zvonik, who was captured during april, they were tortured and sent a photo of the mother , all this would not have happened if russia had not come already in april without finding a place