"IT IS ENOUGH TO BE HUMAN TO SUPPORT UKRAINE"

In her first meeting with the Indian media, Ukraine's only Nobel Peace Laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk speaks to Mridula Ghosh in Kyiv on how to protect human rights and dignity during the war

We agreed to meet in front of the statue of Mahatma Gandhi in the Botanical Gardens near the main red-coloured building of the Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv. This Gandhi statue was the only one in the world to have been installed in 2020, celebrating the Mahatma’s 150th birth anniversary which fell on October 2, 2019, in spite of the pandemic. Reaching the statue, we both pay our homage. Here I stand with Ukraine’s human rights champion Oleksandra Matviichuk, as the organisation she leads, the Centre for Civil Liberties (CCL), was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, some months after Russia attacked Ukraine. With Gandhi as our sole witness, we discuss human rights in Ukraine in the small corner of the botanical garden called the ‘Oasis of Peace’.