At only 28, the human rights lawyer Kateryna Rashevska has become the public face of Ukraine’s campaign to repatriate children forcibly deported to Russia. She knows this means she is being watched.
The past two years have seen the Ukrainian addressing the UN security council, the US Senate and writing submissions to the international criminal court (ICC), which then issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for the “unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children.
“I wouldn’t say that Russians are afraid of me, but they clearly monitor everything we do and publish. I’m not naive about what would happen to me if they [the Russians] took over Kyiv,” says Rashevska, who is the lead on international justice at Ukraine’s Regional Center for Human Rights (RCHR).
“In a recent interview, Maria Lvova-Belova [Russia’s children’s commissioner] referred point by point to the issues we had been raising, even using the same language we used – almost as if she were responding directly to our work.”
Rashevska’s first thought when Russia invaded in 2022 had been to leave Kyiv – where she had been working to launch an investigation into the deportation of Ukrainian prisoners from occupied Crimea to Russia – and join her family in a village in the Poltava region of eastern Ukraine, about 10 miles (15km) from the frontline.
But she knew that living under Russian occupation would be impossible. She had already wiped her devices of all the information and contacts collected through her work so as not to put survivors of Russian forced displacement and deportation at risk if Kyiv was occupied.
“As a human rights defender documenting Russian crimes,” she says, “I understood very clearly that if Russian forces pushed farther inland, towards my home village, I would be the first to fail their ‘filtration’ procedures, where they check documents and devices and put people through interrogation. I understood that risk.”
So instead, Rashevska says she has since “tried to isolate myself from my family”, firstly by taking an evacuation train to join colleagues from the RCHR on a mission to Vienna, and then back working in Kyiv on the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia, and their indoctrination and militarisation.
An estimated 20,000 Ukrainian children are believed to have been deported and/or forcibly transferred from occupied territories into Russia. Some have allegedly been illegally adopted by Russian families, with their names – and in some cases even their place of birth – altered, making reunification even more difficult.
Diplomatic efforts to engage directly with Moscow have yielded almost no results, with just 20 Ukrainian children returned, according to Russian authorities. The few children who have been returned had been displaced in occupied Ukrainian territory, not in Russia, says Rashevska, making the need for international accountability imperative.
“The fight for these children, for their safe return, for the punishment of their abusers is already something bigger than me,” she says. “I simply feel that it’s the right thing to do.
“It’s not a profession, not a job, not a mission. It’s more like a calling inside me that sometimes speaks through me, leads me and helps me in moments of deepest exhaustion.”
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Rashevska says she had been frustrated that the international community was not taking her evidence of forced displacement and deportation by the Russians seriously. She had become so disillusioned that she had even sent her portfolio to apply to art school. As a painter, she felt she might be able to be more effective in bringing about some of the conversations and change she wanted to see in society.
The shift in international attitudes and recognition of the crimes being committed against Ukraine helped convince her to stay working in law. “I knew I was needed here.”
The ICC’s first arrest warrants in 2023 were the moment when Ukrainians started to believe in international law again, says Rashevska. It is one of the achievements she is most proud of, but they have not ended the violence or led to any arrests.
When Putin subsequently travelled to Mongolia in 2024 and Tajikistan this year, both countries ignored their obligations to arrest him as members of the ICC. “The Ukrainians think there is no international justice and that it’s used just as another political tool,” she says.
Recently, she says, she worked on the case of a nine-year-old boy forced to watch the attempted rape of his mother by Russian soldiers. “All these cases, these atrocities, you think about them even during the night.”
Yet Rashevska remains hopeful and says she continues to draw inspiration from the children who have returned and begun rebuilding their lives. “I see children who one year ago were sad and lost but are now happy, have found their community and even started university,” she says.
Rashevska is optimistic about her own future too; the reality of her work has not changed her wish to become a mother one day, although, she jokes, “Putin won’t be indicted before I have children.”
In her nonfiction work Looking at Women Looking at War, the late Ukrainian author Victoria Amelina, who was killed in a missile attack in 2023, started on a portrayal of Rashevska. “It is very symbolic for me that this chapter was not finished,” she says. “There is always more I can do.
“Even when the war stops, I will remain a lawyer. I believe that my struggle has meaning – and the only weapon I have is international law.”
