Human Rights in Wartime Ukraine
By Matthew Parish
Thursday 8 October 2026
Human rights are easiest to defend when they are least under pressure. In peacetime, the language of rights can acquire an almost administrative character: statutes are drafted, courts hear appeals, ombudsmen publish reports and international organisations hold conferences at which principles are solemnly reaffirmed. War changes the atmosphere completely. Suddenly the state is concerned with survival, soldiers are concerned with staying alive, civilians are concerned with obtaining food and shelter and institutions that once had the luxury of debating principles find themselves confronting questions of immediate necessity. It is precisely under these circumstances, however, that human rights cease to be an academic subject and become something urgently practical.
Ukraine presents an unusually difficult example. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the country has simultaneously been fighting for national survival, maintaining democratic institutions, attempting to continue its European integration and dealing with an enormous population of soldiers, displaced persons, prisoners, bereaved families and civilians living close to an active front. The human rights problems arising from these circumstances cannot sensibly be understood as though Ukraine were an ordinary European country experiencing an ordinary period of government. Nor should the fact of war become a universal answer to every criticism. The challenge is to maintain both ideas in one’s mind at once.
The most obvious difficulty is that war necessarily expands the coercive powers of the state. Mobilisation, checkpoints, curfews, restrictions upon movement, military secrecy and limitations upon the publication of sensitive information are not aberrations in a country fighting a major conventional war. They are predictable consequences of it. Yet every additional coercive power creates opportunities for misuse, arbitrariness and corruption. A restriction that is entirely legitimate in principle may become abusive in its implementation. The difficult work of human rights organisations is therefore often not to argue that wartime powers should disappear, but to insist that they remain governed by law, subject to review and exercised proportionately.
This creates an uncomfortable position for human rights advocates. Criticism of Ukrainian institutions can easily be misunderstood as criticism of Ukraine itself. In a society fighting an existential war, public solidarity naturally becomes intensely important. Officials, soldiers and civilians may consequently have limited patience with organisations appearing to question the conduct of state institutions from the comparative comfort of offices far from the front. Meanwhile Russian propaganda routinely takes genuine disputes within Ukrainian society, removes them from their context and presents them as evidence that Ukraine is somehow indistinguishable from the authoritarian state attacking it. Human rights reporting therefore operates in an informational battlefield as well as a legal one.
None of this means that criticism should cease. On the contrary, one of the things Ukraine is defending is the proposition that state power is not unlimited. The distinction between Ukraine and Russia is not merely one between two armies or two flags. It also concerns competing ideas about government. Russia has progressively constructed a political system in which independent journalism, political opposition and civil society have been severely constrained. Ukraine’s aspiration is towards a European constitutional order in which government itself remains subject to law. If that aspiration is meaningful, then scrutiny during wartime is not an embarrassment to the Ukrainian project. It is part of it.
There is nevertheless a danger of approaching human rights in wartime Ukraine through abstractions devised elsewhere. Anyone travelling through Kharkiv, Donetsk or other regions affected by the fighting quickly discovers that the hierarchy of human needs looks different near a war zone. A person evacuated from a frontline settlement may be thinking less about sophisticated constitutional doctrine than about where to sleep that evening, whether there is a mattress, whether medication is available and whether somebody can help an elderly or disabled relative climb a staircase. Human dignity begins with these elementary things.
The enormous displacement caused by the war therefore raises human rights questions that are simultaneously legal, social and economic. Evacuation is only the first stage. People removed from dangerous communities must somehow be absorbed elsewhere. They require housing, documentation, healthcare, schooling, employment and access to social benefits. Elderly people and persons with disabilities present particular difficulties because improvised accommodation may simply be unsuitable for them. Winter magnifies every deficiency. A building that provides adequate emergency shelter in July may become intolerable in January if heating, insulation or electricity are unreliable.
There is also a profound psychological dimension to displacement. A person who has spent an entire life in a village outside Kramatorsk cannot necessarily be treated as though relocation to Lviv, Uzhhorod or Prague were merely an administrative change of address. Eastern and western Ukraine have different histories, linguistic patterns, religious traditions and social cultures, even while sharing a national identity that the war has greatly strengthened. Effective human rights work must recognise the importance of community, familiarity and personal autonomy. Protecting somebody from artillery fire is essential, but rebuilding a life afterwards is a much larger undertaking.
Military service produces another collection of difficult questions. Ukraine requires soldiers because without soldiers there would eventually be no Ukrainian state in which rights could be exercised. Yet mobilisation necessarily involves the state making extraordinary demands upon individuals. Questions about recruitment procedures, medical exemptions, treatment by recruitment officials, conditions of service and the rights of serving personnel cannot simply be dismissed because the country is at war. At the same time, discussion of these subjects must recognise the burden carried by those who have already served for prolonged periods under exceptionally dangerous conditions.
The rights of soldiers themselves can sometimes disappear from public discussion. Military personnel do not cease to be human beings when they put on uniforms. They may suffer injuries, exhaustion, psychological trauma and family difficulties. They require mechanisms through which grievances can be raised without destroying military discipline. The challenge is formidable because an army cannot operate as a debating society, particularly during combat, but neither can military necessity justify every conceivable act by a superior officer. Functional armed forces have always depended upon finding some accommodation between authority and accountability.
Prisoners of war and missing persons create still more painful problems. Families may spend months or years without reliable information about relatives. Returned prisoners may require substantial medical and psychological support. Documenting allegations of torture, unlawful detention and mistreatment is painstaking work, particularly where investigators cannot obtain access to places of detention in occupied territories. Human rights organisations consequently perform an important function not only by recording individual cases but also by preserving evidence that may eventually become relevant to domestic or international proceedings.
The occupied territories represent perhaps the greatest practical limitation upon human rights work. Rights cannot easily be monitored where monitors cannot go. Witnesses may fear reprisals against themselves or their relatives. Electronic communications may be insecure. Memories become less precise over time and documentary evidence may disappear. Investigators must distinguish between credible testimony, hearsay, deliberate misinformation and understandable mistakes made by traumatised witnesses. Good human rights work therefore requires patience and evidential discipline rather than merely moral conviction.
There is a related temptation to reduce human rights advocacy to the production of statistics. Numbers matter because they reveal scale, but every number conceals a biography. One thousand displaced persons means one thousand different sets of possessions abandoned, relationships disrupted and plans destroyed. A list of damaged apartment buildings says little about the pensioner who cannot use the stairs because the lift has stopped working or the family improvising meals because the kitchen has been damaged. Human rights organisations are at their most persuasive when rigorous data are combined with careful attention to individual experience.
Corruption presents another difficulty. Wartime conditions create enormous flows of money, goods and humanitarian assistance. They also create urgency. Procurement procedures may be accelerated, normal supervision may become difficult and donors may lack the ability to inspect projects personally. Most people involved in humanitarian work may be acting conscientiously while even a small minority exploiting the system can cause disproportionate damage. Every diverted generator, medicine shipment or accommodation payment potentially represents assistance withheld from somebody who genuinely needs it.
Yet allegations of corruption themselves require responsible treatment. Accusation is not proof. Wartime Ukraine is filled with rumours, personal rivalries and institutional disputes, while Russian information operations provide an additional reason for caution. Human rights organisations and journalists alike must therefore resist the temptation to publish dramatic allegations before evidence has been tested. Accountability loses credibility if it becomes indistinguishable from gossip. The proper response to suspected wrongdoing is careful documentation, corroboration, an opportunity for those accused to respond and, where appropriate, referral to competent investigative authorities.
International organisations face their own credibility problem. Foreign institutions frequently arrive with substantial budgets, elaborate reporting requirements and professional vocabularies that may seem remote from conditions experienced by Ukrainians. There can be an uncomfortable contrast between the bureaucratic machinery of international humanitarian assistance and the improvised work of local volunteers who may deliver food, evacuate civilians or provide accommodation with comparatively little administrative infrastructure. International organisations nevertheless possess resources, expertise and institutional continuity that local initiatives often lack. The sensible objective is therefore not to romanticise one and condemn the other, but to connect international resources more effectively with local knowledge.
Freedom of expression creates equally delicate questions. Wartime societies inevitably restrict certain information relating to troop movements, military installations and operations. There are powerful reasons for doing so. Nevertheless the category of “security” must not become infinitely elastic. Journalism concerning corruption, administrative incompetence, humanitarian failures or controversial government decisions remains important precisely because war concentrates power. A democratic state demonstrates confidence not by eliminating uncomfortable journalism but by distinguishing genuinely dangerous disclosure from legitimate scrutiny.
The same principle applies to political disagreement. Ukraine’s democratic institutions operate under conditions no constitutional designer would choose. Elections cannot straightforwardly be conducted while millions of citizens are displaced, substantial territory is occupied and hundreds of thousands of citizens are serving in the armed forces. Nevertheless the habits of democratic pluralism — argument, criticism, independent journalism and civil society activity — remain valuable. Wartime unity need not mean intellectual uniformity.
There is finally the question of justice after the war. Human rights documentation undertaken today will shape the possibilities of tomorrow. Evidence being gathered now may eventually contribute to prosecutions, compensation claims, truth-seeking mechanisms or historical records. But post-war justice will involve more than trials. Ukraine will inherit veterans requiring long-term care, families of the missing, former prisoners, displaced communities, damaged cities and people carrying experiences that cannot simply be repaired by reconstruction money.
T
he promotion of human rights in wartime Ukraine must therefore avoid two opposite mistakes. The first is moral absolutism: judging every emergency measure as though Ukraine were living in tranquil peacetime. The second is wartime exceptionalism: accepting every exercise of state power because an invasion is taking place. Neither position is adequate. Human rights law has always confronted emergencies precisely because emergencies are the circumstances in which power becomes both most necessary and most dangerous.
The most effective human rights advocates in Ukraine may consequently be those prepared to live with uncomfortable complexity. They must defend civilians without pretending that evacuation solves displacement, defend soldiers without abandoning military discipline, investigate officials without assuming guilt, criticise institutions without undermining legitimate security and demand accountability from Ukraine’s international partners as well as from Ukrainians themselves. Above all, they must listen. The people living through the war frequently understand its moral ambiguities better than observers attempting to arrange their experiences into neat categories.
Ukraine’s struggle for human rights is therefore not something separate from the war. In an important sense it concerns what the war is about. Territory matters, sovereignty matters and military victory matters because without them the Ukrainian state cannot survive. But the character of the state that survives matters as well. A country emerging from war with strong courts, independent journalism, accountable institutions, vigorous civil society and respect for individual dignity will have achieved something more profound than preservation of her borders.
That achievement cannot be postponed entirely until peace. Institutions develop habits, and habits acquired during emergencies can survive them. Every insistence upon lawful procedure, every properly investigated allegation, every displaced person treated with dignity and every official required to explain the exercise of public power contributes in a small way to determining the country that will emerge from this war. Human rights in wartime Ukraine are difficult precisely because they must operate amid fear, scarcity, violence and necessity. That is also why they matter so much.
