Week 4

My focus at GSF has now turned to Ukraine. CRSV has been endemic to the armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia since Russia’s annexation of Crimea and two Russian-backed secession movements in 2014. Russia’s full-on invasion of Ukraine in 2022 coincided with a worrisome spike in accounts of CRSV perpetrated by Russian troops. In many cases, Ukrainians (both civilians and troops) have experienced CRSV during some kind of deprivation of liberty, such as during detention or at military checkpoints. Because Ukraine is an active war zone, many Ukrainians experience an overlapping set of challenges: the trauma of detention itself, CRSV perpetrated during the period of detention, subsequent displacement to safer territory, the accompanying loss of material possessions and employment and identification documents. All of this on top of the baseline stress of living through war.

GSF began assessing the potential to assist CRSV survivors in Ukraine in 2020. Its work there took off in in 2022, when the Ukrainian government approached Dr. Denis Mukwege, co-founder of GSF and the Dr. Mukwege Foundation, for assistance addressing the needs of Ukrainian survivors. For the next two years, GSF helped draft two laws, one to establish a national reparations scheme for CRSV survivors and another to establish a national registry of survivors. In 2024, GSF and partners launched a pilot project that was conceived as a model for the future reparations program. Within a year, the project identified about 800 survivors and found over 650 of them eligible for reparations. Each eligible participant received 3,000 EUR to be used at their discretion.

The pilot project has been a success, and both laws were actually passed. Unfortunately, funding constraints mean that the pilot project cannot take additional applicants, and the Ukrainian government has decided to postpone implementation of the reparations law. Even though these setbacks are more than disappointing, at least there is a framework for a national reparations scheme to be established in the future.