Kristina Vraschuk sometimes shudders when she thinks about what she does. She is just one of more than 200 Ukrainian lawyers who ex officio defend Russian war crimes suspects and their accomplices in Ukraine, a situation some find hard to come to terms with, Reuters reports.

On the one hand, the suspects are accused in some cases of committing crimes against Ukrainians. On the other hand, democratic principles state that they should have legal representation, and the leadership in Kyiv declares that it is determined to protect these values ​​in the context of the country’s European aspirations.

42-year-old Vrastiuk tells how he spoke in court against a Ukrainian woman whose husband and brother were allegedly tortured to death by three Russian soldiers near Kyiv in the first month of the war. The lawyer argued that the woman did not provide sufficient evidence that she was related to the victims, and requested that she not be admitted as a witness from the trial.

“Believe me, I wanted to get home as soon as possible to wash with hot water,” Vraschuk told Reuters reporters.

Russia denies that forces or authorities it has installed in regions of Ukraine it controls have committed war crimes and says some events, such as the Buch massacre, were “staged” by Ukraine.

Ukrainian authorities say they are investigating more than 120,000 alleged war crimes committed by Moscow’s forces since the start of a full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The United Nations estimates that more than 30,000 civilians have been killed or wounded since President Vladimir Putin launched Europe’s biggest military conflict since the end of World War II.

Ukrainian lawyer says that work should be approached “cold-bloodedly”

At the end of February, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Andriy Kostin, said that so far local courts have handed down at least 81 guilty verdicts, most of them in absentia, and have identified more than 500 suspects.

In one of the most high-profile trials, a court in the Chernihiv region in northern Ukraine convicted 15 Russian soldiers in absentia for abducting 368 people in a basement for nearly a month. As a result of their actions, 10 people died.

In the case that Vraschuk spoke about, the woman, whom the lawyer tried to remove from the process, was finally recognized as a party.

The Kyiv lawyer says she is currently tasked with 4 cases involving Russian soldiers and nearly 30 additional cases involving their local collaborators, a job she says weighs heavily on her soul.

She says she felt the need to apologize to a man in her family who has been in the armed forces since the early days of the war. Vraschuk says his forgiveness helped her continue her work.

“We approach this work cold-bloodedly: the law is above all,” she emphasizes.

In total, Ukrainian lawyers received about 700 mandates to represent the interests of clients, suspects or accused of committing a criminal offense under Article 438 on war crimes of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, reported the head of the Coordination Center for Legal Aid, Oleksandr Baranov. a state institution responsible for appointing ex officio defenders.

Another 4,000 lawyers were assigned cases related to other wartime crimes committed by Ukrainian collaborators, such as treason cases.

Lawyer Artem Galkin, who was born in the Donetsk region and whose home was destroyed during the Russian invasion, maintains an air of distant professionalism as he discusses his work on dozens of cases.

How Ukrainian lawyers defend Russian suspects in war crimes and their accomplices

In one of them, he asked for the return of his client, a Russian soldier accused of shooting a supermarket guard in Buchi, due to procedural defects.

The court agreed, and now the serviceman is being tried again according to the decision of the appeals court.

Halkin, 49, says some of the more difficult cases he has taken on have included cases in which he argued that clients initially arrested for treason after leaking information to the enemy should be charged with espionage, a felony punishable by more small

“As a defense attorney, it’s natural that, regardless of the person, I want to get the best possible outcome for them,” he says.

Baranov, for his part, says that despite public calls to increase punishment, it is extremely important for Ukraine to show itself differently from Russia. He also notes that dormant lawsuits invite further appeals.

But he acknowledges that, ultimately, lawyers have to walk a tightrope as they do their job of defending the law.

“It sounds like a play on words, but to me it’s two different things: one is to say that a person is innocent, and the other is to say that they have not been proven guilty,” he says.