‘Law is the only weapon I have’: a Ukrainian lawyer’s campaign to rescue the children stolen by Russia

Though once so despairing she thought of giving up the law for art, Kateryna Rashevska is still pushing for the return of thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by the invaders

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.”