I meet Oleksandra Matviichuk in a modest café in central Kyiv, the kind of place where, in peacetime, conversations would drift lazily over coffee rather than be interrupted by the distant air raid sirens. She is finishing an avocado toast before setting off on yet another journey across Europe, where she continues her relentless advocacy for human rights and the preservation of the rules-based international order. At first glance, there is something almost disarming about her presence. With long brown hair and sky-blue eyes, she carries herself with a quiet composure that hides the weight of what she has seen. One could never imagine that this delicate young woman has spent years listening to some of the most harrowing testimonies of our time – thousands of accounts of war crimes: torture, rape, executions.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. (Photos copyright Lord Ashcroft) As head of the Center for Civil Liberties, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Matviichuk has become one of Ukraine’s most important chroniclers of both suffering and resilience. Her journey, she tells me, began not with war, but with inspiration. As a child, she encountered former Soviet dissidents – individuals who had paid a heavy price for their refusal to submit. “I suddenly found myself among very noble people,” she recalls. “People who said what they thought and did what they said.” Many had been imprisoned, some killed, others broken by years of persecution. “But they did not give up,” she says simply.