Oleksandra Romantsova on Rights-Based Security, Ukraine’s Hybrid War, and Postwar Justice

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/10

Oleksandra Romantsova is the Executive Director of the Center for Civil Liberties (CCL) in Kyiv, co-laureate of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. She leads documentation of atrocity crimes and advocates for survivor-centred accountability through the International Criminal Court, universal jurisdiction, and a special tribunal for aggression. Romantsova advises policymakers on civilian protection, enforced disappearances, deported children, and rule-of-law reforms, while strengthening Ukraine’s democratic resilience under wartime conditions. Her work connects rigorous evidence collection with strategic litigation and public education, linking hybrid warfare’s legal, informational, and technological fronts. She speaks widely on rights-based security, civil society stamina, and postwar justice architecture.

In this interview with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Romantsova maps Ukraine’s “full-spectrum” hybrid war—military, legal, economic, informational—and argues that rights, not obedience, are the foundation of real security. She details systematic strikes on energy infrastructure, the delivery bottleneck that imperils civilians, and the daily adaptation of drone-driven warfare. Zooming out, she links Ukraine’s struggle to global democratic fragility, notes sobering risks for human-rights defenders, and stresses that peace without rights is only an intermission. Romantsova also highlights AI’s potential as civic infrastructure—useful if access and literacy widen—and reflects on civic mobilization against Draft Law 12414 as proof that Ukraine’s democratic street still lives.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It has been a while. You wrote an analysis with the working title They Are Ethnic Jews: Antisemitism and Attitudes Toward Israel in Russia and Ukraine (2022–2024). I recently released an anthology on antisemitism and am collaborating with several contributors. You examined attitudes toward Israel in Russia versus Ukraine between 2022 and 2024. What is your overview?

Oleksandra Romantsova: We are in the midst of something qualitatively new. Analysts often describe it as hybrid war—Ukraine is unusually innovative technologically, and the conflict runs across military, political, economic, legal, and informational layers at once. That “full-spectrum” character has been most visible in Ukraine since 2022.

It is not only military. It is about international law, the manipulation of information, and the manufacture of parallel “virtual” realities for mass audiences. Both cyberspace and traditional media are instruments here. The scale of psychological manipulation is staggering. Russia has effectively sustained a neighboring population conditioned toward political powerlessness. Russia’s population is about 146 million as of early 2025, which frames the scope of that information ecosystem.

On the military side, the battlefield is a mix of archaic and cutting-edge. You see Soviet-era systems operating alongside rapid advances in drones and counter-drone technology; both sides iterate tactics daily. Russia has deployed loitering munitions and reconnaissance drones such as the Lancet, Geran-2, and Orlan-10/30, while Ukraine has fielded and adapted a growing domestic drone network. The war has effectively accelerated combat testing of new systems.

Inside Ukraine, conditions are often brutal because Russia systematically targets energy infrastructure. Major waves since October 2022 have hit transmission and generation assets, causing rolling outages. By mid-2024, a large share of thermal generation was inoperative, and experts warned of long winter blackouts.

The tragedy is that Ukraine historically can generate substantial power—nuclear, thermal, and hydro—and, in peacetime, even exports electricity to the European Union and Moldova. Exports were halted after heavy strikes in late 2022, partially resumed in 2023, and again in 2025 when capacity allowed. The problem now is not generation but distribution: assets and grid links remain under repeated attack, forcing alternating bouts of imports and exports.

Across the country, delivery is the constraint. We can still generate electricity and prioritize critical infrastructure—schools, hospitals, water systems—but persistent strikes on substations and plants turn distribution itself into the frontline. Civilians are often left without stable power, heat, or water during major attack cycles. Large assaults in March 2024 and again in late 2024–2025 underline this pattern.

In winter, temperatures in Kyiv average roughly −6 °C to −2 °C in January, but parts of Ukraine can dip below −20 °C during cold snaps, magnifying the humanitarian stakes when power is out.

Looking beyond Ukraine, similar humanitarian patterns emerge in other conflicts. Even if a ceasefire stops the immediate killing—as one hopes in Israel and Palestine—lasting peace requires civilian security, access to basic rights, and the ability to build democratic, functioning institutions. Ending fire without establishing rights is an intermission, not a resolution.

That raises deeper questions: are Gaza and the West Bank ready, institutionally and socially, to build a stable state? Do they have the internal trust, capacity, and civic infrastructure? And is Israel itself functioning as a full democracy right now? Netanyahu’s government has raised serious concerns. I hope there is a proper investigation into how recent decisions were made—just as there were inquiries under past leaders such as Golda Meir.

I am in Colombia now, and it is a complicated picture here too. The country recently had a few relatively peaceful years, but since the start of this year alone about 150 human-rights defenders have been killed. That is staggering. What struck me most at a recent security webinar about Colombia was realizing that those 150 people represented a vast, organized civil society—one that existed before those murders. Many of these activists still have some government support for the first time in modern Colombian history. There is the beginning of capacity-building, even if real security is still absent.

Then, of course, you have Trump claiming that too much cocaine is coming from Colombia—as if that is the country’s biggest problem. He even joked that at least it’s “organic.” It’s absurd, but that is the level of discourse we’re dealing with.

Ukraine cannot think of itself in isolation. Here at the FIDH Congress—the International Federation for Human Rights, which has been around for more than a century—you see how interconnected all these struggles are. Every local crisis is also a global one. A breakdown in one region’s democracy or security architecture threatens the entire international system.

I know “international security system” sounds bureaucratic, but it is what allows people to wake up and think about normal things—phones, jobs, breakfast—rather than survival. If that structure collapses, daily life collapses with it. And that collapse is not hypothetical; it is possible right now.

Interestingly, Ukraine has a large number of professionals working with advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence. There is a growing belief here that humanity might destroy itself—unless AI helps prevent it. So the conversation is not only about AI being the threat, but rather that we are the threat, and AI might be one of the few tools that can help us survive ourselves.

It is a philosophical shift I have heard echoed in different parts of the world. In Ukraine, it is not a popular conversation among ordinary citizens, but among professionals, scientists, and technologists. They increasingly see AI as a kind of new moral code—a framework that could stabilize our increasingly unstable species.

You were born into different circumstances, yes, but culture—or perhaps a cult of culture—can make people equal in a sense. I am not sure if that is a concrete English phrase, but AI now seems to be doing something similar. Whole countries can differ widely, yet AI can level them—make them equal—because all you need is access to work with it.

So now you are sitting in the middle of war, sometimes in the middle of fighting with narco cartels, or on the edge of a new conflict, and you are trying to find solutions. Increasingly, people are searching for answers in cyberspace, through technologies like AI—if they have the education and infrastructure. Someone from Zimbabwe, for instance—do they have access to that technology, the understanding of what is happening globally, and the ability to exchange information with professionals as more models are launched? If more people join and follow this process, it could spark a new revolution. People might find new ways to protect themselves from war. Those are my thoughts.

Jacobsen: You were in Geneva for a closed briefing on civilians and captivity. What are your first recommendations for the death maps?

Romantsova: Three thoughts. First, nothing happens without you—nothing bad, nothing good. We once dreamed that professionals, especially politicians, would represent us on issues we would not need to think about daily. But now, politics cannot be ignored. Politics is not merely a profession; it is representation—your representation. If you do not have a position, no one can represent you. If you do not hold standards for what good representation or a good political movement means, then nothing improves. People say politics is dirty, but it is necessary. It is a part of our collective body. So, to all the NGOs and initiatives taking big steps—please continue.

My second point is about the Helsinki Principles: military observation, mutual monitoring, and cooperation. The second part concerns economic and ecological diplomacy and effective collaboration. The third is that security must be based on human rights—what is called the “human dimension.”

If the first point is that nothing happens without you—that means ordinary people, NGOs, and associations must participate—then the second is that many still look for simple models of order: “You give me security, and I will obey.” Thousands of years of history show that this never works. Only human rights can truly guarantee security. The war in Ukraine proved this. You cannot start a war in a country that fully upholds human rights.

Imagine Ukraine in 2012 under President Yanukovych, who persecuted human rights defenders and journalists and repressed activists. Yet we still had freedom of speech, freedom of association, and political rights. Those rights did not function perfectly, but they gave people the tools to participate—and that is why Maidan happened. It was a movement of participation.

We demanded our electoral rights in an organized way. We cannot always gather in the main square to protest; instead, we must vote and protect our rights through proper democratic channels. The key idea is that people must possess the full range of rights so that no one can force them into war—or use them to start one.

We discovered that the practice of upholding human rights helps a nation defend itself against aggression. Even when war is forced upon you, human rights remain your shield. There was a major debate about whether international human rights law still applies during wartime—but it does. It works, and it is the best way to organize your defense.

You must care about human rights within your country, within your army, behind the front lines, and among civilians. That care gives you the motivation to understand what you are fighting for. When we look at Russia, for example, it is clear: over twenty-five years, Putin systematically destroyed human rights. That is why he ended up with 146 million people who either accepted or supported his war.

That is the second point. The third is that we need new models—and these new models will not be comfortable for older powers that profit from being quasi–police states or from presenting themselves as the civilized centers of international law. Look at the UN Security Council: five permanent members, three of which—Russia, China, and the United States—have all been directly or indirectly involved in conflict. France and the United Kingdom may not be fighting now, but historically they have.

France withdrew its forces from Mali, the United States repeatedly threatens war, China could invade Taiwan at any moment, and Russia has already launched full-scale aggression. These are the countries tasked with maintaining global peace—something is deeply wrong with that architecture.

There is also no true representation there. No African nation, no Latin American country, and almost no Asian country—except China—has a permanent voice. Why should billions of people accept a system that excludes them?

The UN is historically important, but de facto it no longer fulfills its purpose. It accomplishes part of its mission—thanks to it, over two billion people have access to clean water. Yet if the UN vanished tomorrow, many would not feel the immediate loss, because the problems it fails to address are already visible.

We must decide not how to destroy this system, but how to repair it—how to solve future problems, not just past ones. Too often, we prepare for the last war instead of preventing the next.

Jacobsen: Draft Law 12414, what was Draft Law 12414 about for the Center for Civil Liberties? It concerned NABU and SAPO—the weakening of anti-corruption guardrails and their independence.

Rosner: Ah, you mean our last smaller Maidan. Yes, let’s talk about that. That’s an important example of what I was saying earlier. I’ve done three interviews with Transparency International, and this fits perfectly. The interesting part is that no organization actually brought people to the square.

A lot of Ukrainians who aren’t on the front line began to say, “Civil war could start here.” There are so many people with guns, so many veterans returning from the front, that they feared someone could ignite conflict. But I told them, “No, if we fail to show those fighting on the front that we can solve domestic problems peacefully, that’s what will bring civil war.”

When I arrived at the protest, it wasn’t on Maidan Square but a smaller one near the theater—a compact, enclosed place surrounded by buildings, so relatively secure. The core organizers weren’t a formal group but three young women, ages twenty-two to twenty-eight—some of them my former students.

When I realized who they were, I saw that the people gathering weren’t organized by any political structure. Anti-corruption organizations joined later, giving lectures after the third day to explain the topic of the protest, because many didn’t even know what NABU or SAPO were. They just sensed corruption and wanted justice.

Of course, the media tried to discredit it, saying the students were paid or that it was just a few people and an old woman sitting at a table with a sign. But in reality, it was a mix—students, middle-aged citizens, veterans—people like me, and older ones too. Veterans, in particular, were concerned about safety.

Imagine someone returning from the front line one day and seeing a big crowd the next. It’s a perfect target for drones or missiles—not from the Ukrainian state, everyone knew that—but from Russia. That’s why, beneath the surface, there was an undercover system of security. Most participants didn’t even notice it, but veterans quietly positioned themselves around the square to protect people.

I tried to help, sharing experience from previous Maidans, teaching the basics of protest safety. They asked questions, and I realized something crucial: we need to teach the history of Maidan—its mechanics—how to organize a peaceful demonstration. Many of these young people were too young in 2014 to remember. They didn’t understand how it worked on a practical level—how to coordinate, protect one another, and sustain a civic movement.

That was my last point. I asked them if they needed any financial support—whether there was something that required payment. They said they only wanted clean water to give to people, since many were staying at the protest for half a day or more. So I confirmed the funding and we discussed the basic logistics: the cost of water, transport, and cleanup afterward. We wanted to keep the city clean and protect the environment.

One of the coordinators asked if they could cover some logistical expenses, like renting electric scooters. We laughed because they called themselves “people with cardboard tables.” It was true—most of their slogans were written on cardboard. When critics claimed the event was sponsored, we joked that the “sponsor” was Nova Poshta, the delivery company, since their name was printed on the reused boxes.

They also joked that the revolutionaries arrived by electric scooter—“summer carts,” as we called them. Around the square, you could see rented scooters parked everywhere, a sign that people had come from all over the city.

The police were cooperative and friendly. We worked with them and had our volunteer observation group, Ozone, monitoring the situation. The dialogue police were helpful too. Some even joked about wanting to go home early during curfew hours. The event was peaceful and disciplined; everyone respected the curfew, which helped maintain safety and order.

That discipline sent an important message to the military and those on the front lines: people back home were defending democracy and anti-corruption efforts in their own way. It also showed the President’s Office and Parliament that “the street” still exists—that peaceful protest remains a living part of Ukrainian political life.

This was significant. Demonstrations were not just for support—like those for relatives of prisoners of war—but could also express dissent. That’s vital for democracy. It showed that Ukraine can hold elections and also sustain other democratic methods.

Ukraine is worth it. I have to run now. 

Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Oleksandra.

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