How war crimes investigators do their jobs in evidence-rich Ukraine

Belkis Wille met a boy who wouldn’t open his eyes at a shelter in Lviv, Ukraine. There, she was recording potential war crimes for Human Rights Watch and had started interviewing the boy’s mother, a beauty salon owner whose face wore new lines of stress and exhaustion.

The day before, the boy, his mother, and his grandmother had fled Kharkiv amid shelling. His father and grandfather stayed in case they needed to fight. Leaving on the train, all three generations of this family watched their home city being bombarded, as their own apartment had been. The youngest, barely 2 years old, had decided he no longer wanted to see. 

“Look at my son,” his mother told Ms. Wille. “He hasn’t opened his eyes since we left Kharkiv.”

Ms. Wille listened and asked for more details, talking next to 20 or so other Ukrainians who had just reached Lviv and needed a place to rest. When they finished, she had three more pages in her notebook to archive on her laptop that night at the long kitchen table in her apartment, where she and her team worked