[Newsreel/ Sky News: It started before dawn. Ukraine woke to explosions around the capital Kyiv.]

Host: On February 24th, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian troops attacked from the north, the east and the south.

[ABC/Nightline: in the last hour or so we’ve heard probably about five or six other explosions]

Host: It’s been more than two years since the invasion. In the areas of Ukraine it occupies, Russia has been rebuilding cities and towns, in Russia’s image. And in the process, destroying what may be evidence of war crimes. So the world doesn’t forget, Human Rights Watch, along with two partners, recently released a major report.

BBC: And nowhere has paid a bigger price than Mariupol.

Host: The report, called “Our City Was Gone,” focuses on what happened in Mariupol. For eight weeks the city in the south of Ukraine was under siege. Thousands died during and in the aftermath of Russia’s assault on the port city. By the end, most of the city’s civilian infrastructure was gone. One of the investigators for the report? Maryna Slobodyanuk.

Maryna: I had the full understanding that Russia wouldn't wait in the nearest future. So, I decided to evacuate me and my family and my parents, my daughter, to the western part of Ukraine.

Host: Maryna is the head of investigations at Truth Hounds. Truth Hounds has been documenting human rights violations in Ukraine for the last ten years - ever since Russia took control of the Crimea peninsula in the south of the country. Truth Hounds, along with SITU Research, a New York-based visual investigation firm, partnered with Human Rights Watch on the report about Mariupol. Maryna’s work is part of that report. Maryna says she saw the 2022 invasion coming, and fled her home in Kiev before it began...

Maryna: It was very sad and emotionally very hard to leave Kyiv because my husband, he was staying in Kyiv. He didn't want to evacuate because he wanted to fight against the Russians.

Host: It wasn’t Maryna’s first time seeing war. Back in 2014, she’d been a legal advisor specializing in financial management. That year, some friends who worked at Truth Hounds invited her to join one of their investigations in Eastern Ukraine, another front line in the war with Russia and Russian proxies.

Maryna: The signs of war were everywhere there. The windows broken, the houses totally demolished or, or, or burned. The people who live in these conditions, their daily routine are explosions, suffering, and, and fear. I witnessed the cases of, of kidnapping, of, of tortures, of inhuman treatment. This is what split my life in before and after. After this mission, I felt the responsibility, because in face of the people I interviewed, I heard their stories. So I was this bridge, this connection, and the feeling of this responsibility was something new, and I realized I have to do something with it. I cannot be just the holder of the stories. I have to put it in the way it would work for justice.

[theme music]

Host: This is Rights and Wrongs, a podcast from Human Rights Watch.

I'm Ngofeen Mputubwele. I’m a writer, a lawyer, and a radio producer.

Life forced me to think about human rights long before I was an adult. I’m the American born kid of African immigrants living in the US. Most of my family lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country at war. And I’ve been inside human rights conversations since I was a kid. The late night phone calls with news from a home you’ve never known. The somber conversations between adults huddled in a living room coping with loss.

Human rights violations alter lives - wherever they happen… and half a world away. And as we’ll learn in a bit, they often involve important issues of law and justice.

[Newsreel about human rights violations in Mariupol.]

Human Rights Watch asked me, as a journalist concerned with human rights, to look at human rights hotspots around the world through the eyes and ears of the people on the frontlines. That’s what we do on Rights and Wrongs. That’s how I met Maryna. But first, let’s rewind to before the war.

Before the invasion, Maryna had been to Mariupol a few times.

Maryna: I was totally… I fell in love with this city, it is so It was so bright and young. A happy one. Though the front line was at that time near the city. I mean, 40 or something kilometers to the east.

Host: And can you just describe your impression of the vibe of Mariupol, this is before the invasion?

Maryna: I would say that Mariupol had industrial vibe and, you know, vacation seashore vibe and artistic vibe because there were many, uh, different festivals and cultural events, with very strong vibes of everything.

Host: Then came the invasion.

[BBC: The Southeaster port city is the only location separating advancing Russian troops from the South and East, so for the last fortnight they've surrounded it, and bombarded it.]

Host: The pictures and videos coming out of Mariupol revealed panoramic scenes of urban destruction. Maryna and her colleagues had some questions. One, were war crimes being committed in Mariupol? Two, if so, could they document these crimes objectively, especially after Russia had taken full control of the city and little information was coming out? And three, could investigators, as Maryna said, serve as a bridge for civilian victims to get their stories to the world?

Host: A few weeks after the invasion began, Mariupol went dark. The city lost power. Its residents were effectively cut off from the outside world. By April 21, with the exception of one steel plant, Russian forces fully occupied the mostly destroyed city. Now there was no way for human rights investigators like Maryna to safely enter the city or even to talk to civilians over the phone… Communication was spotty and residents would have faced retaliation if they spoke to war crimes investigators. Communication slowly came back after Russia took over, but by then people were too afraid to talk. What do you do in that situation as an investigator? If war crimes were committed, how were they going to collect evidence? Who could they interview?

Maryna: Well, 200,000 people left Mariupol, so there were like, uh, this special, uh, they called I’Mariupol centers, which is I'm Mariupol centers, where people from Mariupol could, could be together, could see each other. So we knew about the centers and they actually I think they are in all big cities of Ukraine, you can find them.

Host: So Maryna and other investigators went to these I AM MARIUPOL centers to gather evidence from civilians who might have witnessed or been victims of human rights violations. They were especially interested in pictures or videos that might be on people’s phones…

[audio of phone video of violence in Mariupol]

Maryna: It was very, well, I would say a heroic act if you, living in Mariupol, you decide to bring something, some, some information or some photos with you, because Russian soldiers, they checked the mobile phones and then deleted everything they found or broke them. So these footages became very precious evidences and the source of information for our research.

[fade out phone video]

Host: The videos would play a major role in the final report. But the main evidence they wanted came from the folks who fled themselves and the stories they had to tell. And this is where an investigator working for Truth Hounds has to follow very specific protocols. Because the goal here is not just to get the stories. The goal is to get statements that might later be used in legal proceedings. It’s to get evidence that can be independently verified.

One important part of that protocol? Don’t re-traumatize victims. They have to be interviewed in a safe space, to begin with. Maryana told me about another of their interviewing techniques…

[tape of interview taking place, untranslated]

Maryna: …which is that you have to, you don't, you cannot just leave the person and say.

Okay, goodbye. Uh, thank you very much. Uh, you have to put him on the same emotional condition, uh, in which he or she were at the beginning of the interview. So when the conversation is over, we try to speak about something completely different, anything that could distract them and stabilize their emotional condition.

Host: One interview in particular she vividly remembers. It actually took place in Kyiv, in the offices of Truth Hounds–a safe space, far from the frontline – it was with a former deputy mayor of Mariupol. We don’t have tape of this interview. When Truth Hound investigators were able to interview people in person, they often didn’t record them. They took careful notes instead so that they could craft a first-person narrative. The witnesses would then hear their testimony read back to them, amend it if necessary, and then sign it.

The interview with the deputy mayor lasted four hours, and Maryna says he got right to it. He was eager to tell his story…

Maryna: He was trying to negotiate with the Russians about the humanitarian corridor to evacuate people. They got the agreement on ceasefire with the Russians and he and his colleague went to the checkpoint to check if everything is ready for the evacuation, because it was the road which leads out of Mariupol and there were some concrete blocks on the road so he wanted to remove them for the evacuation buses. And when he came close to it, to these concrete blocks, his car, where he was driving, uh, with his colleague was immediately shelled and they also saw and noticed the drone above their heads, which meant that they were observed by the Russians and that the Russians saw them and attacked this car. They jumped out of the car and the shelling lasted for 40 minutes, maybe, and then they ran away, of course.

Ngofeen: And, and then you in your role as the investigator, when you heard that story, does it register to you as this is potentially a war crime?

Maryna: Yeah, sure, of course. There was obviously a civil car, a white one with no signs, uh, of military, I don't know, of military anything on it. And he was wearing the regular clothes. And so this is nothing that could mean the legitimate military target. Still they got attacked and shelled by the Russian.

[music plays]

Host: The deputy mayor was one of many people Maryna interviewed. His testimony was cited in the Human Rights Watch report on what happened in Mariupol. And the report does in fact accuse Russia of committing war crimes. But what exactly is a war crime? The lawyer in me wanted to understand the legal framework, and for this I turned to Belkis Wille…

Belkis: International humanitarian law, which is this body of law, also known as the laws of armed conflict, is the legal regime that's in place in a time of armed armed conflict and specifically what we're looking at in in in the documentation that we do.

Host: Belkis is an associate director in Human Rights Watch’s Global Crisis and Conflict Division. She lives in Kyiv and she worked on the Mariupol report. Belkis explained that the laws of armed conflict were designed to minimize civilian harm and civilian casualties in times of war, and that the laws prohibit certain acts…

Belkis: Things like the targeting, the direct targeting of civilians, or even carrying out attacks that might not be targeting civilians, but where civilians are being killed because the attack was disproportionate. So there might have been one small military legitimate target, but the attack was carried out in a way that also then killed a disproportionately large or harmed a proportion - disproportionately large number of civilians. So those kinds of acts are banned under international humanitarian law, as are other serious violations of international humanitarian law. Things like torture, sexual violence, pillage and the destruction of civilian property, all of which can occur in the context of fighting.

Ngofeen: And with that context, what were you seeing in Mariupol as the attacks began two years ago now?

Belkis: What we saw very quickly was that they were launching massive attacks, bombardment of the city at a time that they knew it was full of civilians. You know, this is what forced so many civilians to hide out in their basements. And very quickly started to them to see them being cut off from access to food and water and electricity because the bombardments were so heavy. The bombardments were also affecting things like, uh, the electricity lines and, and supply lines in and out of the city. I mean, so many civilians were killed because of this mass bombardment of the city that was really for weeks, um, relentless. And because of the, the scale of the military operations and how the Russians were approaching the city, they were able to encircle the city and very quickly cut off all routes out. So civilians were on the one hand facing, uh, heavy bombardment, with munitions that were hitting civilian, uh, sites. But on the other hand, they had no way out of the city. And, and, and so that's really, you know, when, when we're talking about the kind of death toll that we, that we saw in a city like, uh, Mariupol, I mean, it's, it's because of that.

Ngofeen: Do you remember any of the, of the people that you spoke to and sort of the, the kinds of stories that they told you?

Belkis: It was the older people and people with disabilities who had the most horrifying stories that really stayed with me. I remember interviewing one woman in her 60s who, uh, uses a wheelchair. And because of her disability, she didn't want to and couldn't go down to the basement because she can't use a bucket as a toilet, which is what everyone else had to do. So she had to stay in her apartment so that she could use the toilet in her, in her bathroom. And she remained in her apartment alone. Her kids would come up from the basement, but they had young children of their own, her grandchildren, that they would leave in the basement. They would try to come up once a day to check in on her. She was living, if I remember correctly, on the ninth story of her building. And she described to me how bomb blasts shattered the glass on her windows. And it was, of course, cold at the time. So then she was looking out onto the city with no barrier, no glass or anything, watching explosions happening all around her. The building was shaking every time there was an explosion in the vicinity. And she described at one point just putting a blanket over her head, sitting on the couch, waiting to die.

Ngofeen: And how did that woman and her family, it sounds like, get out? How did they end up leaving Mariupol?

Belkis: So this, this family was lucky in that they had a car that hadn't been damaged by bomb blasts and was still largely functioning. And when they heard through, you know, it was people spreading messages across different basements, um, somehow, remarkably, that there was going to be this big, um, group of people getting into cars and just, and just leaving and, and, and hoping for the best and praying for the best. And so they, they got word of that in the basement her children were in. And so then they carried her down the stairs, uh, they had several people come to carry her down the stairs and, and, and put her in the car, and then they just drove, and they and everyone else who, who traveled in this convoy had to go through many Russian-erected checkpoints before they, they were able to get to Ukrainian territory. They were very lucky that they were allowed through and not blocked. Other convoys were blocked and turned back, but this convoy was able to make it out.

Ngofeen: Hmm. And was, was she in fact, did she end up being a witness to war crimes or other serious violations of international humanitarian law?

Belkis: Some of the attacks that she saw out of her window may have constituted serious violations of international humanitarian law, but we weren't able to get that kind of granular detail. From her because what she saw was really just from the vantage point of her balcony. And again, what we need to know when we're documenting a specific attack and the lawfulness assessing the lawfulness of a specific attack is the exact civilian casualty count. Were there civilians killed and injured in those attacks? And, you know, she was only seeing them from a distance. And then, on the other hand, were there Ukrainian armed forces present in the areas that were being attacked.

And sometimes, you know, figuring out the impact of an attack on civilians, you know, really requires us to actually go to a cemetery and count the bodies or, speak to a gravedigger, which we've done here in Ukraine, to talk about how many bodies he buried in that instance to be able to really verify the civilian casualty count. Of course, in areas that we can get to, we assess the physical destruction. In person, we assess the marks that are left behind by the weapons system that allow us to maybe know what kind of a weapon it was. But where we can't get to those areas, it's really these witnesses that we're relying on to give us that kind of information.

We're trying to figure out the specifics of the attack, the time of day, where it was exactly. We might want to ask questions about things like the weather, because if we might have seen photos or videos online that purport to be from that same attack, we want to verify, that those photos and videos are real.

And then we try to figure out who it is that was behind these attacks. And that could be because, we know where the attack came from. So we can assess the directionality of the attack or the type of munition system. It might be a bomb system that only the Russians are using or only the Ukrainians are using.

And so by figuring out the type of weapon, it allows us to know who it was that fired it. And then, of course, whether, there were military in the area at the time of the attack and therefore whether this might have been a legitimate military attack. Um, you know, it could be that a military base was being targeted and a few civilians happened to have been next door and, uh, were killed in, in what would be deemed actually, sort of lawful collateral damage.

[Music plays]

Tirana Hassan: Hi. This is Tirana Hassan – the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch. At Human Rights Watch, we investigate and report on abuses happening in every corner of the world. We’re journalists, country experts, lawyers and other professionals who are doing everything we can to expose perpetrators and to help protect vulnerable people. We’re a nonprofit, but to keep our independence, we don’t take money from governments. That’s why we rely on support from people like you. If you value what we do, please donate. Go to hrw.org/podcast/donate. That’s hrw.org/podcast/donate. Thank you.

[Music stops]

Ngofeen: Let's skip a little bit forward to you've now, you've gathered the evidence you've gathered, you know, you've gathered the information you could gather. You've spoken to people you've verified, uh, um, with satellite imagery with social media videos that you've also verified to make sure they're real. That information is gathered. You formulate a report. What is the purpose? What's the aim of doing that?

Belkis: Perpetrators like to be able to commit abuses in the dark. Because that carries a fairly low cost to them as long as those abuses remain in the dark and their perpetration of those abuses remains in the dark. And so what we're trying to do is shine a light, a very bright spotlight on those abuses and on the perpetrators involved in those abuses to increase the cost of them continuing to perpetrate abuse and shining the spotlight, you know, is is making this public. And so for us, once we have the facts, once we've carried out our analysis, we need to make everything that we've collected public. And the aim there is, particularly in the case of abuses ongoing in Ukraine and in Mariupol is to ensure that an accurate historical narrative is being captured.

We want to make sure that the world, that Ukrainians, that Russians know what happened in Mariupol and who is responsible. And we want to make sure that that is enshrined while people still have the memory of what happened and and all the specifics of what happened. Um, that then developing that accurate historical narrative is really going to be essential to Ukraine's future and to Russia's future for that matter.

Ngofeen: Hmm. Who, who is the light shined upon in this report?

Belkis: Through the research for this report, and thiswas really through not just interviews with, with, with, with witnesses, but through a, a broad. Uh, search across among other things, social media, uh, and messaging apps was identify specific units that were present in and around Mariupol while the military operations occurred.

And so we were actually able to identify a total of 17 units who were involved in these military operations. So we identify, of course, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, we identify also the head of the National Guard, the Minister of Defense, his General Chief of Staff, as well as a range of other units and individuals in command control that we know were giving orders to conduct the attacks that we were examining, or who were physically present while these attacks were occurring.

Host: That was Belkis Wille, one of Human Rights Watch's researchers on the report on Mariupol. You can read the report – OUR CITY WAS GONE – watch a video, check out the 3D reconstructions and the data visualizations about the Russian war crimes in Mariupol on Human Rights Watch’s website, H-R-W dot org.

[Music plays]

Before we go, I want to go back for a moment and consider the victims and the witnesses who contributed their stories to the report. It made me wonder, what do they get out of this strange process of telling a researcher about the most horrific things that have ever happened to them? And what do they make of it when the researcher writes a statement, usually in the first-person, and then reads it back to them, for their approval. This is something that came up in my conversation with Maryna…

Maryna: When people hear that someone else is telling his story in first person, ‘I got under shelling, I was kidnapped, or something’, this person, he or she like, live this situation once again, go through it once again, but see it from the distance and, and got distanced from it. And that is how, he sees it's beyond this trauma bubble and that's how it can have the healing effect.

Ngofeen: Someone else is telling the story using I and so it's like it's not you it's them in a way - it gives you like an inch of distance at least.

Maryna: Yeah, that's right.

OUTRO:

HOST: You’ve been listening to Rights and Wrongs, from Human Rights Watch. This episode was produced by me and Curtis Fox. Birgit Schwarz was the supervising editor. Our associate producer is Sophie Soloway. Thanks also to Ifé Fatunase, Stacy Sullivan, Blaire Palmer and Anthony Gale.

The news clips at the beginning of the episode are from Sky News and the BBC.

I’m Ngofeen Mputubwele. See you next time.

[Music fades]