Source: Based mainly on Maksym Butkevych’s speech to the XIII Civil Society Development Forum, 6 December 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izv1S3bwCFk. Other sources include an interview for the Ukraine Crisis Media Center 25 November 2024 www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwGefanoyq4 and a Public Interest Journalism Lab interview 4 December 2024 www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-PVq8oKX7Y

 

Maksym Butkevych was a journalist and a human rights activist, who saw his mission in helping refugees including all those who were looking for refuge and internally displaced people. He was a co-founder of the ZMINA Human Rights Center and the Without Borders project, aimed at helping asylum seekers and Ukrainian IPDs as well as countering hate speech. As a journalist he worked in all kinds of media projects and in 2013 co-founded Hromadske Radio.

 

When the Russian aggression started on 24th of February 2022, Maksym went immediately to the recruitment office and joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine. His military unit took part in the liberation of several towns and villages in the Kyiv region. In June 2022 Maksym’s platoon moved to reinforce Ukrainian military units that were holding their ground in the east.

 

On 21st of June 2022 Maksym Butkevych and part of his platoon were taken prisoner. Maksym spent two years and four months in Russian captivity, all the time in the Russian-occupied territory of Lugansk.

 

Maksym describes his captivity as a total violation of human rights. The first months were particularly horrific. The prisoners had meals three times a day but the food was disgusting and the portions were very small. The POWs could hardly sleep because they were all so hungry, practically starving. When in the evening they had to go to bed it was impossible to sleep because as soon as they closed their eyes, they saw food. They were starving.

 

Hygiene items did not exist. To trim their nails they had to grind their nails on concrete. There was no toilet paper. They were not given their prison uniforms until autumn, several months into their captivity. And before that they wore the clothes in which they were taken prisoner, excluding the things that were taken away from them. For example, on their way to Lugansk all the shoes were taken off the POWs because Ukrainian military boots were better than the Russian ones. For the next few months the POWs had only their socks and no shoes or boots.

 

And in comparison with the criminals who were sentenced, the POWs were not taken for a walk but had to stay in their stone cells which they only left to be taken for interrogation. This is a violation of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of POWs. Also in violation of the convention it was impossible to contact your family and or even to correspond through the International Red Cross. So there was no correspondence, no contact, no calls. And not a single visit from the International Red Cross although unfortunately this had been expected by the POWs. It was very uncomfortable for Maksym to speak about the International Red Cross as he had always had a great respect for this organisation. He had been working in close contact with it when he had been helping refugees and had had about 16 years’ experience of cooperation with the Red Cross before his Russian captivity. Despite knowing all the difficulties facing international organizations in working with Russia, he still hoped against hope that they would come one day. After a while all the POWs stopped expecting to see Red Cross representatives.

 

Regarding interrogations, without exception, every single POW was subjected to threats and violence. Beatings, electric shocks, rubber batons.

 

A criminal case was fabricated against Maksym and he was sentenced in court to 13 years of strict regime. He had two lawyers but they just received money for fulfilling the court’s instructions. However, colleagues who had worked with Maksym when he was defending human rights cases in Russia and his relatives managed to find an, a lawyer, a real lawyer, in Moscow who agreed to defend him. This was Maksym’s first contact with someone outside the prison, someone who was not a part of the system. It was in the spring of 2023, a little bit less than a year before he was exchanged. After sentence there was a Court of Appeal that took place in Moscow. Maksym was in Lugansk and was present at the hearings through video. It was an open court and many people attended, including a lot of Maksym’s colleagues, friends and people from Russian human rights circles. And for the first time Maksym had the chance to communicate with them. However, systematic correspondence did not start until February-April 2024 when he was allowed to write and receive letters. At that time Maksym was already in a prison camp and not subject to the earlier POW correspondence veto. It was explained that the war was still going on. When finally Maksym was allowed to correspond it was a very active correspondence. At first he received very few letters and then they turned into streams and then rivers. As a result he received several hundreds of letters which he managed to bring back home from captivity. They were letters from all kinds of people, strangers and people he knew, from Russia and from other countries too. There was no direct correspondence with Ukraine. That was impossible but it was made possible through third, fifth, tenth parties and in the end Maksym began to receive letters from his family in Ukraine. And that was real happiness.

 

Whether Maksym’s human rights experience helped or interfered is difficult to tell. On the one hand, it was a very important experience for him to be in the shoes of those whom he had once tried to help. Maksym was in a situation when there was a constant, systematic violation of the human rights which he had tried to defend all his life and he believes this will be very useful for him in his future work.

 

Maksym did not read any document he had to sign up to January 2023. At first the text of a document would be covered with a sheet of paper and he was shown only the place where to put his signature. Later the Russians would not even bother to hide the text. They would just say, "Sign quickly. Put your signature here quickly!" It was because either there were no laws or the laws were completely ignored. The laws had nothing to do with whatever was done during the interrogation. Your rights and responsibilities meant absolutely nothing! You were put into a situation where you could sign whatever you were given to sign and treated like an object that could be placed here or there, you could be forced to do something or you could be forced not to do something. And if by any chance that object was getting out of control then it should be broken, it should be broken physically.

 

The first person Maksym was thinking about in that situation was his great grandfather. Naturally, Maksym had never known his great grandfather because he was shot in 1938, his sentence proclaiming him to be an enemy of the people. The sentence was passed by the NKVD Troika (a group of 3 commissioners who convicted people without trial in the 1930s) in the Poltava gaol. In spite of the fact that the better part of 80 years had passed, 84 years to be exact, and in the another region, his great grandson also had to sign protocols admitting something he had never done. And those confessions also became the reason for his conviction though Maksym was not sentenced to be executed but to 13 years of strict regime. The system was exactly the same and Maksym understood very well the mechanisms that were used and experienced them on himself. Before captivity he had understood them theoretically but now he understood it with all his body, with every cell of his body. The system was the same. Completely unchanged. Whatever was done during the Stalinist Great Terror by the NKVD and OGPU, was then done by the KGB, and now by the FSB. New people came, new generations came, the new millennium started but the system stayed and still lives on. What happened to Maksym’s great grandfather happened to Maksym himself. Maksym is a religious man and he prays to God that we could do everything to break that vicious chain and that terror would never ever happen to our grandsons and granddaughters. Because if we do not break that chain, it will definitely happen again.

 

Nothing could bring Maksym to despair and Maksym thinks that he was lucky in that sense. There was not a single moment when he thought that they had been forgotten. There were times when other POWs would come to him and ask why he was so sure that they would not stay in prison forever. There was a certain logic in that question but Maksym tried to explain in this way. He said that the prisoners were like goods kept in a warehouse and according to the laws of the slave trade they were not POWs but hostages or "goods". Each had its price so the prisoners were kept in captivity not for the sake of being kept, because that would just be a waste of resources. No, well why? They were kept in prison to be sold at the slave market. And there was no doubt the Russians were interested to do that quickly so that they would spend less time and effort on them. So in truth, Maksym did not believe that they would be forgotten. However, there were some hard moments for him although they had nothing to do with despair, they were connected to the realisation of how fragile people were, how fragile their bodies were. Maksym is a believer and for him death was not the end. But his greatest enemy was fear. Maksym was afraid to be afraid. He was afraid. Everyone was afraid. But at the same time hope was there. Everything was a source of hope, even the understanding that he had not been forgotten and the thought of how many wonderful people he had met in his life. He believed and hoped that most of them still remembered him, and he was not mistaken in this.

 

Thinking of the future he knew that the integration of people on the Ukrainian territories occupied by the Russians would be not an easy task, particularly if you consider the territories occupied since 2014. Those territories that had been occupied by the Russian after 2022 were in a very different situation. And in fact, there was a clear difference between people who had lived in the territories under Ukrainian control and those that were under Russian control or run by the puppet state the Lugansk Peoples Republic. This difference is in attitude to yourself, to your rights, to your responsibilities, to your chances and to your country. The realisation of your responsibility and your freedom, the possibility of changing something. Maksym believes that the greatest challenges on the territories occupied by the Russians since 2014 were not the fact that part of that population is pro-Russian. Most people who are really pro-Russian would leave, they would not live on land that is under Ukrainian control. And let them go. That is their right. While the rest would accept whatever would be offered to them as they are passive. And that would be the greatest challenge and not the pro-Russian position. The passivity, conformism and absolute lack of responsibility are the greatest challenges. They have been living in a world where the authorities decide everything, where an individual person is a nothing, he cannot influence his life and the best thing he can do is to operate within the framework defined by the state so that nothing could happen and hope that in exchange for this the state would take care of him, feed and warm him, give him some small luxuries and entertain him. He would have no right or responsibility to choose what is being done in that state. For example, with the war or “special military operation” as such people call the war in Ukraine, those people believe that they are not responsible for what is happening because it was their leadership that came up with the idea, they are conducting it and so they and only they are responsible. Even the fact that people are the cannon fodder does not bother them at all. It is just their bad luck and their fate. However, on the plus side is they are proud to belong to that state, to that powerful Russian Empire that everyone fears. To the Russian mentality if you are frightening it means that you are respected.

 

So this particular mentality would be our greatest challenge because our way of thinking is absolutely different. Our state is built on different principles. First and foremost on the principle of respect for the rights of the individual, the principle of having discussions, freedom to choose your personal direction of development and to fight for this choice, the chance to criticise the authorities, or to despise the authorities if they deserve it. In a word, we have quite a different attitude to the government, we have quite different values. We are active and responsible citizens while the Russians are conformists who are constantly scared and keep their head under the parapet.

 

Negotiations with Russia will take place sooner or later. If a war does not finish with the capitulation of one of the parties or its complete physical destruction which is practically the same, any war has to finish with negotiations. The question is when and on the basis of what. If these are negotiations for the sake of negotiations then they have no sense because they would not be about peace, but in the best case scenario, about a truce. That would give Russia time to prepare for a new phase of an even greater war, even bloodier, even more terrible with an enormous number of victims and greater grief and suffering. It does not only have no sense but it would make the situation much worse. And the same is true concerning agreements. Not just in relations with Ukraine but in international relations Russia has clearly shown that it keeps agreements only while they are beneficial for Russia. And when the agreements are no longer beneficial for Russia, they can be neglected and in that case when they are worth less than the paper used to sign them on. Maksym believes this something that some of our international partners do not understand. That is why Russia would only fulfil an agreement if it had no other choice. Ukraine must have security guarantees, not something like the Budapest Memorandum but a well thought out and perhaps tested mechanism.

 

Surely, first of all we are talking about NATO membership. Maksym has never been a great fan of NATO because he finds it personally difficult to be in favour of a military alliance, but it would be an important mechanism of security for Ukraine. All other options seem like empty chatter at the moment. It would be essential to talk about territories and borders and not just because all our territories are important to us but, unlike Russia, it is the people who live in those territories who are the most important to us. We are fighting for people. We are not fascists. We are not obsessed with areas and territories. We value people most of all.

 

At the moment, the priority for Maksym is to return those people who are still in captivity in Russia. Maksym is very grateful to everyone who helped him return and be free again. But thousands of our men and women, young men and young women, servicemen, POWs, both those who were sentenced and those who were not sentenced, civilians who even outnumber the POWs, are still in the Russian captivity. They should be returned by whatever means we have and Maksym sees this as his own mission. He wants to be useful in this task and he wants to persuade our partners why it is so important. It is not only about the POWs who are the part of the history of the war, but it is more about the violation of international humanitarian rights, about a slave trade, about taking hostages. Maksym wants to work in this field and he understands the need for international advocacy for the sake of Ukraine.

 

As for the continuation of Maksym’s service in the army, he thinks he should see in what field he could be most effective: as a human rights activist working to facilitate the return of people from Russian captivity and building up a system of reintegration and rehabilitation, and first of all international advocacy on the side of Ukraine. Or as a serviceman. Where would he be more useful: as a civilian or as a serviceman. It was important for Maksym to be a soldier during this war although he had never seen himself as a soldier and had never thought that he would become one. But for Maksym it is important to be a part of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. It is an important part of his identity at the moment.

 

But it now seems that he could be more useful as a civilian, particularly in international advocacy. If so he could retire from the armed forces. Maksym understands who we must protect ourselves from. When the state is everything and a person is nothing, when the leader of that state is at the top of the pyramid it does not matter what he calls himself: a Fuhrer, emperor, president. And people are sacrificed to those fantasies in the head of that leader. It is important to remember that we are not just defending our territories. If, God forbid, we are not able to hold on, then we will be absorbed by that world and that mentality. And we cannot allow it. Neither for ourselves and those who are close to us, for our children, for the generations to come. And in the end we would not be the last that that world wants to absorb. This is a reality because when the POWs were transported to Lugansk some of the Russian officers were heard to say that when they finish with the Ukrainian phase, they will go on. Although they did not expect such resistance they were sure they would overcome it, for them it was only a question of time. And then their Russian army would be the most capable army in Europe and even in Eurasia. They are ready to go forward. And Ukraine is only just one stage in this progress.

 

So Ukraine is not only fighting for themselves but we are fighting for much greater and more important things. It just happened that we are on the front line. Somebody had to be there. It is important not to forget this.