Kyiv-based human rights attorney Oleksandra Matviichuk speaks at the 34th IPA International Publishers Congress in Guadalajara. Image: Publishing Perspectives, Porter Anderson
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘We Use Words for Something More Essential’
In the spring of 2022, the world still was transfixed by Putin’s harrowing, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. The audacity of that land-grab still was electrifying.Those of us who had the chance to hear the Kyiv-based attorney Oleksandra Matviichuk speak that spring at Kristenn Einarsson‘s World Expression Forum (WEXFO) in Lillehammer and then last week at the International Publishers Congress (IPA) in Guadalajara glimpsed a kind of wartime evolution at work.
“Russia is attempting to break the resistance of the country by means of what they call the ‘immense pain of civilian populations,’” Matviichuk told her audience in 2022. “Vladimir Putin is not afraid of NATO. Putin is afraid of the idea of freedom.”
Since her WEXFO speech, of course, much—and too little—has changed. 
Within the few days since Matviichuk gave her keynote address on Thursday (December 5) at the International Publishers Association‘s congress in Mexico, The New York Times‘ Moscow bureau chief Anton Troianovski has written, “Over the last two weeks, as the rebels that Russia called terrorists swept across Syria aiming to topple one of Russia’s closest allies, … Mr. Putin has suffered one of the biggest geopolitical setbacks of his quarter-century in power. He took that blow, analysts said, in large part because his military is bogged down in Ukraine.”
And yet even as Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine argues that if his country is allowed to succumb, Putin will take revenge on Syria, it’s hard to think that these sudden weekend turns of events in Syria can be overly heartening to the soldiers and people of Ukraine. With the fall of Damascus, new currents of untethered geopolitical power are curling around parts of Europe and the Middle East. The Ukrainians may now have even less clarity about their future, about their backers, about the winter closing in on them, about how to find an end to their nightmare.
Related article: ‘Ukraine’s Oleksandra Matviichuk at WEXFO: The ‘Interconnected World.’ Image: Publishing Perspectives, Porter Anderson
On a darkened stage, Matviichuk told her audience of international publishers in Guadalajara, “When Russia launched the large-scale war against my country, many familiar things remained from the pre-war world—among them, the usual words, their architecture, and the context of their functioning.
“We faced the fact that it is difficult to find the right words to convey the experience of living through war to the world. It turns out that there is an immense difference between reading the news, listening to survivors, seeing videos of destruction, and living this experience firsthand. The usual words seem not suitable for this, and some experiences are beyond any words.
“I drew attention to this phenomenon in my Nobel speech,” she said, “saying that words like shelling, torture, deportation, mass grave and filtration camps—had become commonplace for millions of people in Ukraine. Yet, there are no words to truly express the pain of a mother who lost her newborn son after the hospital maternity ward got shelled. To have just hugged her child, called him by name, breastfed him, inhaled his smell, and then to have her world shattered by a Russian missile. Now, her cherished and longed-for child is lying in the world’s tiniest coffin.”
The war has taken its toll not only on Matviichuk’s observations of violence, loss, and dread, but also on what she can tell publishers—who work with words for a living.
“The issue is that familiar language constructions are always more about simplification,” she said in that careful, probing, measured but strong alto voice.
“Let’s take my own example. I am a human rights lawyer and I have been applying the law to defend people and human dignity for many years. But now I am in a situation where the law does not work. Russian troops are destroying residential buildings, churches, museums, schools, and hospitals. They are shooting at the evacuation corridors. They are torturing people in filtration camps. They are forcibly taking Ukrainian children to Russia. They are abducting, robbing, raping, and killing in the occupied territories. The entire UN system cannot stop it.
“War turns people into numbers. The scale of war crimes grows so fast that it becomes impossible to recognize all the stories.
“We use the words for something more essential. We are not just documenting violations of Geneva and Hague conventions. We are returning people their names. Because people are not numbers. The life of each person matters.”
Matviichuk, named one of the Financial Times‘ 25 most influential women in the world, saw her Center for Civil Liberties win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.
Oleksandra Matviichuk onstage at the 34th biennial IPA International Publishers Congress in Guadalajara. Image: Publishing Perspectives, Porter Anderson
‘I Still Have Hope’
When Matviichuk spoke in Lillihammer in 2022, she wore a white blouse and colorful trousers.
Now, when she speaks with massive images of destruction and strife projected behind her, she wears a simple black dress. It meets her dark hair, leaving little in the stage light except her face. She is sheathed in the darkness of what has befallen her world.
And her remarks, some of them below, are no longer a litany of new and shocking atrocities.
Now, she has five messages to deliver:
“First. We are losing freedom in the word. More than 80 percent of people around the world live in not-free or partially free societies.”
“The issue is that familiar language constructions are always more about simplification.”Oleksandra Matviichuk“Second. We are dealing with the formation of an entire authoritarian bloc. Authoritarian countries consider people to be objects of control and deny them rights and freedoms. Democracies consider people, their rights and freedoms, to be of the highest value. There is no way to negotiate this. The existence of the free world always threatens dictatorships with the loss of power.”“Third. Unpunished evil grows. In May this year Russia deliberately targeted the publishing house in Kharkiv. It was one of the main publishing houses in the country. More than 50,000 books were burned. Seven people were killed. Twenty-one people got serious injuries. There is no legitimate reason for doing this. There is also no military necessity for it. Russians did these horrific things only because they could.”
“Fourth. We must call a spade a spade. I work with people who went through hell. Let me assure you that people in Ukraine dream about peace. But peace does not come when the country which was invaded stops fighting. That is not peace, that´s occupation. And occupation is the same war, but just in another form. Occupation is not about changing one state flag to another. Occupation means enforced disappearances, torture, rapes, denial of your identity, forcible adoption of your children, filtration camps, and mass graves.”
“Fifth. Ordinary people can change history. I don’t know how historians in the future will call this historical period. The world order, based on the UN Charter and international law, is collapsing before our eyes. The work of the Security Council is paralyzed. Now fires will occur more and more frequently in different parts of the world because the international wiring is faulty and sparks are everywhere.”
The wild attacks, the shock of the shelters, the outrage—it seems to have morphed in almost three years into something else now, something both more coherent and calm.
It’s not resignation. In Matviichuk’s voice, you hear the resolve even more strongly than before. It’s simply mature. The long haul has set in. And maybe that’s why Matviichuk focuses so much of her speech on words, their choice, their importance.
“I still have hope,” she told her hushed publishers’ congress audience in its capacious theater, the Conjunto Santander’s Sala Four.
“Hope is not confidence that everything will be fine,” Oleksandra Matviichuk said, “but a deep understanding that all our efforts have meaning.”
More from Publishing Perspectives on the International Publishers Association is here, more on the IPA’s biennial International Publishers Congress series is here, and more on Ukraine under the Russian attack and its impact on publishing is here.
Publishing Perspectives is the International Publishers Association’s world media partner.
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