Trapped in trauma
Matviichuk speaks softly and rarely raises her voice. Despite years spent documenting atrocities, she remains strikingly resistant to cynicism – a matter of conscious choice, she explained. What concerns her about Ukraine's post-war future is not only the physical devastation, but the possibility that Ukrainians might carry the war's damage inside themselves long after the fighting ends.
“I'm very worried that my nation can be trapped in a position of victim,†she said. “Offence [a sense of having been wronged] is the strongest poison ever.â€
The danger, she argues, is not only personal but transgenerational – historical grievances can outlive the events that produced them, binding societies to inherited anger for centuries. Hatred, she says, can't be contained: “When you cannot reach the war criminals who harmed you, you start directing it at the people around you – your family, your community.â€
The pursuit of justice, then, is also a way out of that trap – collective and personal at once. But what justice actually means to those who need it most is not always what institutions are designed to deliver.
Matviichuk recalled a recent gathering organised by colleagues for victims of Russian war crimes from Kherson – people who had survived drone strikes or lost relatives to them. Russia has been hunting civilians with drones in the region, she said, deliberately targeting people on bicycles, families in cars. Among the cases discussed was the killing of a two-year-old boy playing in the garden of his family home. After the formal conversations with investigators ended, someone asked what justice meant to them.
“Most of the people said the same thing,†she recalled. “We want the world to know what happened to us.â€
