Yahupova was then moved to a detention center where she spent four months without facing any charges. Her interrogators insisted that she confess to being a leader for a resistance group in the city. One evening, a guard slid a book through the food opening in her cell door about the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. “He said, ‘Read this, it will come in handy,'†Yahupova recalls. The message was unmistakable: Ukrainians are the Nazis. “But in reality, the book was describing [the Russians]!†Yahupova says. “I eagerly read it all the way to the end.â€
Finally, a man the detainees and guards called “Batman†extracted her from the detention center and drove her toward the village of Verkhnya Krynytsia, near the front lines, and handed her to Russian soldiers. One of them placed a shovel in her hands and solemnly announced: “The time has come to work for the good of the Russian Federation.†Yahupova had entered a forced labor camp where Ukrainian civilians like herself excavated trenches and constructed multiroom dugouts for the Russian army.
Yahupova says she spent two grueling months in the camp along with 18 other detainees — including a farmer, a medic, and a teacher — digging trenches under the watch of Russian soldiers. “They constantly mocked us: ‘I'm going to shoot you right now, and I won't face any consequences for it,'†she recalls.
The experience of torture and forced labor turned Yahupova into a crusader exposing Russian human rights abuses in Ukraine. After her release, she helped journalists from Suspilne (Ukraine's public broadcaster) identify “Batman†as Roman Vnukov. She testified in The Hague. She gave Ukrainian police the name of the FSB officer who had tortured her, Yan Zanevsky. And she pushed authorities to launch an investigation into the forced labor she endured in Zaporizhzhia.
But her campaign for justice underscores just how hard it is for Ukrainians to prosecute or even simply document crimes by Russian occupying forces while the brutal war grinds on. Her case is just one of more than 240,000 war crimes that have been documented in Ukraine. The country's domestic legal system is overwhelmed, and its police must fight Russians on the battlefield rather than investigate war crimes. Where courts have reached guilty verdicts against Russians — more than 150 so far — they have mostly been in absentia, the sentences likely never to be served.
“The desks of 23-year-old investigators are piled high with thick case files involving rape and murder,†says Dmitry Durnev, an analyst at the Ukrainian Centre for Strategic Communication and Information Security who is currently writing a book on war crimes investigations. “Meanwhile, the police force, which ought to be investigating these cases, is fighting on the front lines. It is a situation of utter hopelessness: Thousands of families see no meaningful justice.â€
This is particularly evident in Zaporizhzhia, the war-torn region where Yahupova was detained. Durnev said that half of police personnel are fighting the Russians and the city is under constant bombardment. “Amidst this cycle of death, investigating war crimes becomes impossible,†he says.
Yan Zanevsky, the man Yahupova identified as torturing her, was tried and convicted in absentia, but he was given what she considers a meager sentence of 12 years in prison because of prosecutors' inability to gather evidence for more charges. “Think of how many people he tortured,†Yahupova says with disgust.
Without thorough investigations, Yahupova fears a postwar inquiry by international authorities will be hampered. “Once the war ends, there will be a tribunal, just like at Nuremberg, and it is up to all of us to determine what evidence we bring before it,†she says. A more specific problem compounds these challenges: It is difficult, often impossible, to determine who gave the orders to detain, torture, rape, and otherwise brutalize Ukrainian civilians. In the first war crime trial of a Russian serviceman after the full-scale invasion, a soldier named Vadim Shishmarin was convicted of murdering Oleksandr Shelipov, a civilian from Chupakhovka in Sumy Oblast in northeast Ukraine. Yet the two superior officers who actually ordered the killing were never even questioned before being exchanged for Ukrainian POWs, leaving the chain of command unaccountable.
Ukraine's war crimes investigations have also been undermined by the Trump administration's cuts to State Department programs that funded war crimes investigations. Those cuts have set back the work of people who document war crimes by conducting interviews with survivors and witnesses in de-occupied territories, then submit evidence to Ukrainian authorities and the International Criminal Court (ICC). “In 2025, 90 percent of our work was dependent on US State Department funding,†says Anastasiya Donets of the International Partnership for Human Rights (IPHR), which sends teams to interview survivors. “All this funding has been frozen for months when President Trump came to power.†IPHR was forced to close their Kyiv field office, dismiss two staff members, and sell their mission vehicle.
When an IPHR team visits remote villages, survivors there often insist the documenters “only share this information with the International Criminal Court in The Hague,†Donets says. Yet the ICC faces critical constraints. It charged Putin for child abductions, but can realistically prosecute only a handful of senior officials. Moreover, it cannot try individuals in absentia, meaning fugitive Russian commanders likely escape justice. Perhaps most critically, the ICC cannot prosecute Russia for the crime of aggression, a gap Moscow deliberately created by refusing to sign the Rome Statute, which gives the ICC the authority to investigate and prosecute crimes under international law.
Many human rights advocates want to create an international body called the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, an idea that emerged in the first days of the war and was later endorsed by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the European Parliament, NATO, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). But it, too, would face the likelihood that Russia would simply refuse to surrender defendants for trials.
Another obstacle to an international tribunal is declining political will in the West, says Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School professor and former prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the ICC. “There's a diminished appetite for creating new institutions like this because they're self-propelling and expensive,†Whiting says. “Countries that would ordinarily fund tribunals are now spending more on defense and energy.†Syria is a cautionary example: Despite an ocean of documented crimes against humanity during its nearly 13-year civil war, no international tribunal was formed to bring justice for victims.
Whiting, who has spent nearly 25 years working in international justice, frames the deeper problem this way: “Justice is always incomplete. It's too slow, doesn't adequately serve victims, doesn't rebuild what was destroyed. So the real question is: At what point does incomplete justice become worse than none?â€
Looking back, Olena Yahupova is glad that a prison guard decided to taunt her by slipping her a book about the Nuremberg trials. “Reading it, I came to believe in justice. That my suffering wasn't meaningless,†she says. “I reread passages over and over; they resonated so deeply. Perhaps someday someone will read a book called ‘The Ukrainian Tribunal in The Hague.' â€
Lilia Yapparova can be reached at lilia.yapparova@globe.com. Follow her on X @lilia_yapparova.
