Featured Stories

Shortly after a deadly attack hit a children’s hospital in Kyiv in July 2024, a team of UN Human Rights officers and experts were busy at the site, interviewing medical staff, parents and residents, meticulously monitoring and documenting the realities of war. As the team carried out its work, stunned-looking children sat in hospital beds set up in parks and streets, their bodies still connected to medical drips, while smoke rose from rubble.

This was not Andriy’s first video, but he knew little about human rights. "I saw a contest, and I thought that we have this situation in Ukraine, and why not show Ukrainians in this situation? Every person has a right to life," says the 11-year-old from Chernivtsi in Western Ukraine.

On a hot sunny day in early August, Ivan, a burly retired welder in his fifties, stood in front of his ruined house in Posad-Pokrovske, Kherson region, pointing to a patch of blackberry bushes.

“Blackberries grew in front of my house and local children constantly ate them. Now the blackberries are drying up and no one touches them. This makes me very sad,” he said during an interview with UN human rights monitors.

“The Russians interrogated our boys here. This is where they ate and this is where they went to the bathroom, everything happened here,” said Anna Mushtakova, standing in the boiler room of the local foundry in Dymer, a small town 46 kilometers north of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

“Some witnesses confirmed that they shot at the ceiling to intimidate our boys,” said Mushtakova pointing at the pock marked wall of the foundry’s boiler room crammed with equipment.

On International Women’s Day, we introduce Nataliya, one of countless Ukrainian women who have been helping others, men and women alike, deal with the horrific consequences of the gross human rights violations that Ukraine has experienced over the past year.