We are publishing a series of articles and interviews from the 2024 festival guide. The first article in the selection is an essay written by the human rights advocate Oleksandra Matviychuk, head of the Center for Civil Liberties and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2022. These are warm memories and, at the same time, a strong call to action which the author dedicated to Maksym Butkevych, the festival’s old friend and human rights advocate. Today Maks is in Russian captivity.
I can’t recall the moment when I first met Maksym Butkevych. But it feels like I’ve known him as long as I can remember. For me, he is associated with calm strength. In Russian captivity, during the show trials, in a colony in the occupied Luhansk region, Maks continues to share his warmth and support. In these brief messages, I read a lot of love and care for us, his colleagues and friends. Although we have it immeasurably better: we, after all, have our freedom.
In recent years we haven’t seen each other that often, and when we did, it was usually for work. Out of the whole range of human rights issues, Maks chose to protect the most disadvantaged category of people, who unfortunately have never evoked much empathy in any society: refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants. He has an acute sense of justice and always defends human dignity. So he could always unmistakably spot signs of authoritarianism or xenophobia. And he was never afraid to stand up to them, even if the majority did not understand or support him.
Maks is a deep person. In one conversation, he mentioned his self-education in theology. I wonder how that happened. I still regret not asking for more details about this when I had the chance. It was interesting to discuss both abstract philosophical concepts and practical human rights issues with him. No wonder he was a co-founder of Hromadske Radio, whose slogan ‘Listen. Think’ he embodied in his life. Maks can listen thoughtfully like no-one else. You want to share things with him.
As a person of action, he is always prepared to help raise awareness about other issues. So we worked together on a human rights plan for the newly elected parliament, devised strategies for overturning police impunity for torture, and went out to demonstrate in defence of freedom of thought and speech. I don’t remember a single significant human rights event in all these years when he wasn’t present in one role or another.
In response to the brutal dispersion of students on the Maidan in November 2013, our team launched the Euromaidan SOS initiative. We undertook to provide legal aid to all the protestors who faced persecution all over the country. Of course Maks was one of the first to come and help. As a journalist, he also found time to write the daily Euromaidan SOS reports on beatings, torture, and arbitrary arrests. As a human being, he supported the volunteers with jokes and self-irony. I like to remember his humour in those difficult times.
We were all unprepared for war. Now it feels more than obvious: when Yanukovych’s pro-Russian regime fell, Russia began an armed invasion to stop us on our path to democracy. But in February 2014, when I wrote a message in the coordinators’ chat that it seemed like Russian soldiers, disguised as ‘little green men’, had appeared in Crimea, Maks was genuinely surprised: “Lesia, what are you talking about?” Back then I didn’t understand what was going on either.
One of Maksym’s key life principles is solidarity. When the Russians arrested the first political prisoners in Crimea, he founded the Committee for Solidarity with the Hostages of the Kremlin. I still remember a public demonstration when we were carrying a big birthday cake for Gena Afanasyev, whom the FSB had labelled as a terrorist, and after torturing him threw him in jail. Maks knew for sure that as long as we were fighting honestly for our people, we were giving them the strength to survive until they saw the moment of their release.
Maksym believes in the best in people. So for many years he helped develop the Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival. I remember him announcing a demonstration of solidarity in support of the illegally imprisoned filmmaker Oleh Sentsov from the festival stage. A few years later, the festival participants organised a demonstration in support of Maks and raised signs reading #FreeMaksymButkevych.
Docudays UA opening ceremony in 2023. Photo: Stas Kartashov
After he had been captured, I had an opportunity to meet Maks’s parents. His father and mother, true Kyiv intelligentsia, are fighting for their son’s liberation and are bearing their trials with dignity. It is horrifying to even imagine what it has cost for them to live through Maks’s almost six-month-long ‘disappearance’ since the Russian show court’s decision, which sentenced him to thirteen years in a high-security prison colony.
The criminal case was so clearly preposterous. The Kremlin’s executors accused Maks of war crimes against civilians on a day when he was not even in the Luhansk region. His lawyer provided the court with all the required documents. But the sentence was handed down ‘from the top’, so nobody cared about the evidence.
I mentioned Maks in my Nobel Prize speech. I really resonate with his answer to the question of why he, an anti-militarist, joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion. I know it by heart. Starting from “the times are tragic” up to “I am where I should be.”
You should be with us, Maks. We love. We believe. We fight. We wait.
Author: Oleksandra Matviichuk
Header photo: Oleksandra Matviichuk's speech at the opening ceremony of Docudays UA in 2024. Stas Kartashov
