Andriy Kostin, Prosecutor General of Ukraine, and Liev Schreiber, co-founder of BlueCheck Ukraine, spoke with IBA Director Mark Ellis. They discussed a wide range of issues, including the importance of timely support from Ukraine’s allies and ensuring impartiality and fairness in war crimes trials.

Mark Ellis (ME): It does seem exceedingly restrictive that the allies, but particularly the United States and UK, have not moved more aggressively in providing Ukraine with weapons it needs. I wonder if you could comment on that from your perspective.

Andriy Kostin (AK): From the beginning of the full-scale invasion, some of our strongest partners have used the phrase: ‘we will support Ukraine as long as it takes’. The reality now is that this formula of carefully managing the conflict by creating limits on how Ukraine can defend itself has cost a lot of Ukrainian lives.

138,000 incidents of Russian war crimes, thousands of stolen Ukrainian children and thousands of civilians illegally detained, tens of thousands of civilians killed. It is the best part of a generation of patriots falling to Russian bullets every day. Millions displaced abroad, millions under occupation.

Those who restrain how Ukraine fights [believe] they are preventing a worse war – but this is not true for Ukraine.

So, yes, give us everything and let us strike as deep as possible so none of us have to make this sacrifice against the same enemy again.

ME: Do you feel that we are at a point where this actually will occur and that the United States and others will now provide the type of military armaments that you need?

AK: You ask a very important question about how Ukrainians resist, how they fight during these two and a half years. Ukrainians always live between hope and belief. So, we hope and then we start to believe and our work with our partners shows that everything we asked was delivered.

But some of the stuff was delivered later than it was necessary to deliver, and it takes us quite a long time to prove that we really need specific weapons, that we really need specific ammunition. At the end of the day, we have been given tanks, we have been given different types of missiles, we had been given F-16s. Though discussion about, for instance, F-16s started in 2022.

Time is of the essence. So it’s very important for the politicians to be brave enough to take decisions in a timely manner, because time costs lives of Ukrainians.

ME: Liev, what do you think about that issue?

Liev Schreiber (LS): President Zelensky responded to the [US presidential] debate. When asked how he felt about the remarks in the debate and President Trump’s reticence about outwardly saying he hopes for a Ukrainian victory, President Zelensky said that he felt that this was an election season and that there is a certain range of response that we just set aside to things that are said during the election season.

And we need to stop looking at elections and policy as shifts of power, but rather ways in which, as Americans, we exercise our values and our principles. And I certainly think that the Ukrainians’ fight for democracy and sovereignty is one that speaks directly to our own policy and values.

ME: One of these core values would have to be this issue of accountability. Do you remain confident that Ukraine has been able to build a process to ensure this degree of accountability that’s necessary and to do so within Ukraine’s legal system?

AK: It’s the work of hundreds and thousands of Ukrainian investigators and prosecutors devoting their lives, even risking their lives, collecting evidence. This war is already named as the most documented war in history.

But our commitment to deliver justice in time, I think it’s commitment which unites us with our partners and friends and colleagues from international institutions like the International Criminal Court [ICC].

It's not easy, but we are using new technologies and techniques to investigate crimes, collect evidence for cases and build prosecution strategies. We already have 131 convictions in Ukrainian courts even during the war, which means that we not only document, we not only investigate and prosecute, we bring cases to court and we have convictions.

There is a lot of evidence, of course, and our commitment is also to bring justice for every Ukrainian who has suffered at the hands of Russia's illegal war of aggression.

Russia openly describes their aims to eradicate our identity and our nation in genocidal terms. The idea that because they commit a lot of crimes, we shouldn’t aim to prosecute them all – this only weakens international human rights law, the laws of war and the laws that govern peace.

This is not a time to compromise with the aggressor. They must finally believe the rules apply to them also. Defeating Russia and holding them fully to account: these are two steps that are necessary to reverse the rise of autocratic powers. I believe my team can live up to this legacy.

But the idea, which you mentioned, to ensure the trial is fair, I think it’s a unique feature of how Ukraine is dealing with war crimes, taking into account that each and every Ukrainian hates what Russia are doing. It could also be the investigator or prosecutor or judge or defence lawyer. How would they deal with this issue?

We have created a system of training all elements of the judiciary. We train prosecutors, not only in the law, not only in international criminal law, but we also train them to be impartial.

LS: It’s a tremendous amount of legwork, which I can attest to personally because I was part of the group that went to consult with the UN Council about the 20,000 children who were abducted – Ukrainian children – who were abducted in Russia [which Ukraine] attempted to repatriate.

It is such a tremendous amount of legwork to go through the proper channels, and one of the extraordinary things that I think Kostin’s office has achieved is digitising that process and automating that process so that you have the level of access and accountability that you do.

ME: You approached providing aid in Ukraine in a fairly unique way because your approach was not just providing assistance, it was trying to figure out a way that you could gain credibility among donors to ensure that their resources are not going to be corrupted. How did that come about and what do you do to ensure that?

LS: One of our board members is Natalie Jaresko [former Finance Minister of Ukraine] and she speaks very eloquently about this process and how hard the Ukrainians have been working to remove corruption from their government structure. And they’ve done a remarkable job of it, but we knew going in that raising money for Ukraine, that was going to be a challenge. Everyone realises that local aid really is the best way to go. That’s because no one is more capable of helping Ukrainians than the Ukrainians. They just need the resources to do it.

So, what we’re trying to do at BlueCheck is to exploit that quicker, more direct route to humanitarian aid by approaching local – for the most part, Ukrainian – organisations, that’s the model. The part that’s important in terms of the fundraising – which is essentially what I do – is this spectre of corruption that haunts Eastern Europe, and particularly Ukraine.

ME: I noted that the Atlantic Council came out with a report this year that indicated that Ukraine ranks now among the world’s top performers in anti-corruption in their index. Do you feel confident that Ukraine has now moved beyond that perception of corruption?

AK: Of course, the corruption is an internal enemy that we have in Ukraine. So, we have the external enemy: Russia and its allies and, you know, spies, traitors, collaborators. While the internal enemy is corruption. And, of course, we are fighting corruption as one of our priorities.

When international organisations confirm our tendencies, this is very important because it also shows confidence to Ukrainian people and to our partners that Ukraine’s commitment to fight against corruption is one of the most important tasks before our society.

And today the parliament of Ukraine finally adopted a law on the reform of the customs service. This is one of the most corrupted state institutions, and it’s very important that now the head of the Customs Office will be selected by the board of experts where half of this board will be international experts, and they will have the casting vote in case the vote is equal.

The most important element – which I would like to highlight – is if you see and if you hear about more cases of corruption in Ukraine, it doesn't mean that we have more cases. It means that we have more reaction on cases compared with ten or 20 years ago.

ME: Do you have any final remarks?

AK: I want to commend the efforts of all my IBA family to ensure justice for victims of this war, and special thanks for the eyeWitness to Atrocities app which helps us to collect thousands of pieces of evidence which are later on used in our criminal cases.

You are fighting with us shoulder to shoulder to ensure victory of justice in the courtroom in Ukraine, in the ICC and in other countries. And my sincere gratitude to Liev, who supports Ukrainians globally.

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This is an abridged version of the conversation with Andriy Kostin and Liev Schreiber. The film of the conversation can be viewed in full here.