Oleksandra Matviichuk

Yesterday, at a meeting of the Global Foresight Council in Paris, we discussed security. War has changed dramatically over the past five years. At the start of the full-scale invasion, I refused to evacuate and remained in Kyiv, which the Russians were trying to encircle. Back then, the war took the form of a column of Russian tanks storming my city. But today, it’s a completely different war. It’s a war of unmanned vehicles, the use of AI, massive drone attacks, complete battlefield transparency, and rapid-fire long-range weapons. All the military experience of the last century is simply irrelevant. Today, it’s not just military power that takes center stage, but a society’s capacity for resistance. You can have modern equipment and weapons, but if the country lacks people willing to defend it, that won’t help you much. Likewise, if the people on the home front are unable to withstand the onslaught of war, even the most experienced army cannot hold back the enemy without support from the home front. This winter, with temperatures at minus 25 degrees, millions of people in Ukraine lived without heat, electricity, or water. It’s hard for me to convey just how difficult it was. But all the banks were open, parliament held sessions, classes took place in schools, and hospitals performed surgeries. This is what the world calls Ukrainian resilience. But in reality, this is “total defense” itself. When a simple action becomes an act of resistance. People matter. Without working with people - those who take their freedom and security for granted - neither a powerful economy, nor military potential, nor even nuclear weapons will save developed democracies. Because if you are rich and weak, in a world where the international system of peace and security is dysfunctional, you will be plundered. And I see almost no frank discussion of this in developed democracies. Only a few countries stand as rare exceptions. In the rest, a psychological mechanism of denial dominates - the idea that “we are unique, so something like that simply cannot happen to us.”

On the night of July 28-29, 2022, a powerful explosion occurred on the territory of the former penal colony in occupied Olenivka. Ukrainian prisoners of war were being held there in a separate barracks. The day before the explosion, the Russians took about 200 soldiers from the Azov regiment and placed them there. As a result of the explosion, about 50 people were killed and another 70 were injured. Eyewitnesses say that people were burned alive. Those who tried to get out onto the road were shot. No one provided medical assistance. The Russians just watched as people died. Captured medics tried to save those they could, wrapping people in pieces of cloth. Only in the morning were the wounded loaded into trucks like cattle and taken away. “In Olenivka, they burned what was left of my faith in people,” recalls one of the freed medics. War crimes have no statute of limitations, and we will seek to establish the truth about what happened. May the memory of the victims live on, and may their families find strength. Photo: Alexandr Ermochenko/Reuters/Scanpix/LETA

On 30 June, ¡Aguanta Ucrania! and the European Parliament organised an event on the defence of international law and human rights, and the role of Europe and Latin America in the face of the invasion of Ukraine. youtu.be/hbRQ44L2UtA?si… via@YouTube

🫪 Putin threw himself a Navy Day parade without a fleet. Instead, he settled for a giant printed picture of a submarine.

The bright illustration made by Oleksiy Kustovsky. The Russian Navy Day without navy.

This is funny. Putin celebrates Russian Navy Day with a poster depicting the sea and a submarine. The tradition of Potemkin villages continues.

As long as there is no Russian missile attack, my cat is trying to get some sleep.

💬 "Peace doesn't come when country which was invaded stops fighting. That's not peace. That's occupation," says Ukrainian Nobel laurate Oleksandra Matviichuk.

At just 18 years old, Danylo was detained by russian authorities and sentenced to 12 years in a russian colony for donating 5,200 hryvnia, just over $100, to support Ukraine. Now Danylo is 21 and has endured 3 years of torture in these conditions. russia tortures children.

Five years ago, the regime in Belarus launched an attack to erase the civil organizations that held our society together. On this day in 2021, more than 50 NGOs were targeted for dissolution. In total, at least 2,044 non-profits have been forced to shut down since 2020.

‘Kateryna Savenko’s Diary’ has been published. She lived in Mariupol with her beloved husband and daughter. On the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion, she began to record the events she was experiencing. There are just 34 entries in total, after which the diary tragically ends. It is a true miracle that Kateryna’s mother managed to smuggle two filled-up notebooks out of the occupied city. Her daughter had asked her to find this diary and tell the whole world what was happening in Mariupol. This almost biblical ‘I want the world to know’ sentiment is something I often encounter in people who have survived the hell created by the Russians. The diary has been published to a very high standard. As Natalia Yemchenko said, it was important to them that everything was accurate, so they took our time and consulted with experts. We have no emotional distance from the events, so reading these texts is painful. Take, for example, this note to her mother. The Russians shell the hospital and it goes up in flames. Kateryna’s mother finds her daughter by chance. She is lying under a chequered bag. And she dies in her mother’s arms two days later in the cellar. Kateryna’s daughter and her sister were at the presentation; Kateryna often addresses her sister in the pages of the diary once text messages had stopped getting through. As Kateryna’s words were read aloud, they held each other’s hands. I thought that this is exactly how we’ve been holding on to one another all these years. To be honest, it’s a very harrowing diary, but it needs to be read. It’s vital to produce professional translations into various languages. Because this is about the right to the truth. Kateryna’s voice must be heard by the world, just as she wanted. The note at the second photo says: Mom! I'm wounded. To the city hospital! The doctors have all left. My leg is broken and my face is torn. Vitalik is dead. Nadya in the hospital basement. Help.

Nobel Peace Prize laureates Maria Ressa, Oleksandra Matviichuk, and Jody Williams joined the @NobelAssembly, which concluded with the Rome Declaration for an Unarmed and Disarming Peace, calling for responsible AI use to serve peace. 🌿 globalnobelassembly.org/rome-declarati…

🚨 Today at dawn, Iran's regime executed political prisoner Mehdi Khanaki, 26, a law graduate, in Karaj, for participating in the January 2026 uprising. Arrested on 10 February and severely tortured, he was charged with PMOI membership. The regime’s Mizan news agency claimed he possessed arms at the time of arrest. The PMOI submitted details of his arrest and torture to UN Special Rapporteur @drmaisato on 1 March 2026.

#Ukraine: 10 years after Belarusian-born journalist Pavel Sheremet was killed by a car bomb in Kyiv on 20 July 2016, the investigation into his death remains unresolved. RSF pays tribute to the reporter and calls for transparent justice. rsf.org/en/ten-years-a…

I arrived in Kyiv late at night and a rocket attack began almost immediately. It was incredibly loud; the house was shaking and the doors were banging. After such a long journey, I had hardly any strength left. I’m so tired of these sleepless nights. I also found myself thinking about my trip to Syria. As I stood amongst the ruins of what used to be a city, there wasn’t a single intact residential building as far as the eye could see. The Russians were responsible for this horror in Syria. The Syrians had absolutely no way of protecting themselves from Russian missiles and bombs. If the Russians could, they would do exactly the same to us.

Yesterday I was in Düsseldorf at the wonderful Asphalt Festival 2026. The event took place at an art museum right on the riverbank. There used to be a motorway there, but following a major redevelopment, access to the river has been restored for the city’s residents. I’d love to see the same thing happen in my home city Kyiv.   A huge crowd turned up. The audience was predominantly German, but there were also Ukrainians amongst them. Wherever I speak – be it in Brazil or South Africa – local Ukrainians always come along to support me and give me a hug. As Inna Nelles says, we come together to recharge our batteries from one another. And then carry on with our work.

Hatte gestern die große Ehre, @avalaina zu hören und persönlich zu treffen. Vielen Dank für die großartige und und unermüdliche Arbeit, ich bin tief beeindruckt. Wir müssen um jeden Preis der Ukraine helfen, sich zu verteidigen und zu bestehen./ Ki

How interesting. Even pro-Kremlin pollsters are being forced to acknowledge a sharp drop in Putin’s approval ratings. Most Russians remained silent and supported Putin when he launched a bloody war against Ukraine. They went about their lives as usual, paying no heed to the mass killings in Bucha, the famine in the occupied town of Oleshky, the flooding of towns following the blowing-up of the Kakhovka dam, the suffering of tens of thousands of Ukrainians in Russian torture chambers, the drone ‘safaris’ targeting civilians in Kherson, the missile terror in Sumy, Kyiv, Dnipro, Kharkiv and Odesa, the abduction of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure in winter at minus - 25 degrees °C. They were perfectly happy with all of it. They gladly travelled to the occupied Ukrainian territories to move into the flats of the Ukrainian families they had killed. But when, in the 12th year of the war, Ukrainian drones began striking military targets in Russia – leading to a massive fuel crisis and everyday hardships – suddenly the war no longer suited them. One former Ukrainian oligarch, who is now behind bars, liked to say that life is like a supermarket: you can take whatever you want, but remember that the checkout is waiting for you at the end. This is a good explanation of the principle of accountability for Russians who think solely with their stomachs – those who are now shouting, ‘But why?’. I always say that Russians are the sort of people who will calmly tolerate a war criminal at the head of their state. But they will not support a loser who is a war criminal. That is why the only tactic that works is to make the cost of war for Putin higher than the cost of peace. Putin simply couldn’t care less about any peace talks.

Such a pleasure to have @avalaina visit Düsseldorf & the Asphalt festival. Several messages of her speech, which I moderated, resonated with me. She said: „hope it is not a confidence that everything will be fine. Hope a deep understanding that all over efforts have a meaning.“

Today, July 17th, on the Day of International Criminal Justice, it has been exactly 12 years since the Malaysian Boeing MH17 was shot down by the Russians military personnel in Donbas. 298 people, including 80 children, lost their lives that day. I want to express my support to the families and loved ones of the victims. We have not forgotten. We stand with you.