Photo: Child in winter clothes and Ukrainian flag. Credit: Michele Ursi via Alamy.

Ukraine’s Human Rights: More Than Words

Russia has sought to extinguish human rights in the four years since its full-scale invasion and 12 years since the war began. Ukrainians fight to keep them alive.

By Lera Burlakova

February 23, 2026

For Ukrainians, human rights are not abstract. They are immediate, personal, and very fragile. Often, they come down to one question: will someone survive?

Amnesty International Ukraine has tried to capture this in Rights in Our Hands, a 2026 calendar built around 12 people, one for each month, and one for each right.

For the Right to Life, it tells the story of Marta Levchenko.

Marta runs the City of Goodness and the House of Butterflies — shelters which, since the full-scale invasion, have taken in children evacuated from frontline and occupied areas. Many are children, others don’t know how to help: they have severe disabilities, complex diagnoses, or conditions that make even basic evacuation nearly impossible.

Photo: Marta Levchenko. Credit: Photo Courtesy of Lera Burlakova.

“Those most at risk in this war are those who can’t help themselves,” she says. “They are children who can’t descend into a basement, they are children who can’t ask for medicine or assistance.”

The right to life sounds absolute, but in reality, it depends on timing, access, care, or whether someone shows up in time. Marta talks about children who died because of the effects of the relentless Russian onslaught on civilian housing, medical facilities, and schools.

“Children with cancer did not receive chemotherapy in time,” she says. “We have lost countless lives.”

War kills directly. But it also kills quietly through delays, broken systems, and missed chances. Some of the children who arrive at Marta’s shelters are already living with the consequences.

They cannot read or write at an age when they should. They have missed not only classes at school, but the sense of safety that allows a child to develop at all.

And some cannot be evacuated unless someone builds a way, so Marta does just this. Her team has created evacuation routes across regions under constant threat, like Donetsk, Kherson, and Sumy.

Doctors and volunteers, working with international organizations, take risks at every step. “The main task is to protect life and to get the children out of danger,” says Marta, who relies on donations to keep her shelters open.

What she is building is not only about survival, but is the way lives are lived. “If light, faith, and love appear in palliative care, then it is also about happiness, hope, and dignity,” Marta says.

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She tells the stories of Zlatusya, a girl who cannot see or hear but who smiles when someone takes her hand, and of children who were told they would never stand but have taken their first steps. There are also adults who arrive distant and rational and leave changed.

The Amnesty calendar also tries to go beyond simple information and to change those reading the stories.

There is the medic who has been evacuating the wounded since 2014, the teacher who survived years of captivity and still speaks about the truth, the journalist who refuses to stop documenting the war despite nearly being killed, and the parents searching for a son who may still be alive in captivity.

Different rights, different lives, but the same pattern: when systems break, people step in.

And Ukraine has been living in that reality for 12 years, not four. The full-scale invasion simply made it visible to the world. For many Ukrainians, it has been a long continuity of loss, adaptation, and resistance.

Marta realized long before 2022 that some children lose their families not because of violence, but because of poverty. Sometimes it would be enough to fix a stove, support a mother, or create conditions for a family to stay together. “Why do adults fail to see what is obvious?” she asks.

The war did not create this question, but did make it more urgent. Rights do not only disappear because of bombs, but they also disappear when no one takes responsibility for preserving them.

Human rights matter not as something written on paper, but as something alive, tangible, and dependent on decisions made by real people in real time.

Four years into the full-scale invasion, it is easy to speak about Ukraine in numbers: territory, weapons, budgets, and negotiations. But there is another layer, quieter and more fragile, it is the work of keeping people alive, of making sure that a child who cannot run is evacuated, that someone holds their hand. That someone decides they matter.

“To save every life, to embrace with the heart and to heal, that is the highest value,” Marta says.

In Ukraine, this is more than a slogan, it is how human rights will survive.

Lera Burlakova is a Democracy Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). She is a Ukrainian journalist and former soldier who served as an infantrywoman from 2014-2017 after joining up following the Russian invasion of Crimea. Her war diary, Life P.S., received the UN Women in Arts award in 2021. She lives in Kyiv and works as the Campaigns and Media Coordinator for the new Amnesty International Ukraine team.

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.