Spokane native Kristin Blyckert was in town this week to visit her family and stop by her alma mater, Whitworth University. Blyckert has lived in Kyiv, Ukraine for nearly three years. She’s a lawyer for a non-governmental organization, Global Rights Compliance, and works with Ukrainian officials to build human rights cases against Russian soldiers and others suspected of war crimes.
We asked her to tell us what Kyiv looks like after more than three years of war.
This interview lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Kristin Blyckert: There's kind of two Kievs happening in parallel. There's the normal Kiev that was there before the war, and it is a gorgeous city. It's ancient history. It's been there since like 700 A.D. or something like that, hundreds of years before Moscow was anything more than a forest.
There's so many cultural events, and there's a bustling music scene. The culinary scene is incredible. The difference now is that, with pretty much everything, there's an element of raising money for the war because funds are tight.
And then there's the war realities in the midst of these cultural scenes, music festivals. There's a music festival I go to every year and it has three music stages in a bomb shelter. If there's a bomb threat, the other concert will just move them all down to the shelter stage. There's going to work in the morning after spending all night in the bomb shelter and not really getting much sleep, but it's just, you know, we keep going. And I say we, but really, Ukrainians, they're incredibly resilient, and they have no choice, and they keep going.
And then there's the kids who, if there's a drone threat or a bomb threat in the middle of the day, they all go down to the shelter with their teachers and try and keep learning algebra or literary analysis or whatever it was.
DN: How has your assimilation into Kiev become? Are you an honorary Ukrainian now?
KB: My colleagues do say that I'm an honorary Ukrainian. They're so sweet. I've been trying to learn Ukrainian. It's a very difficult language. But the beautiful thing about Ukraine and Ukrainians is, once you're in, they're ride or die for you. They're just, like, the most supportive, wonderful people.
Ukrainian is a more niche language, because up until the full-scale invasion, if foreigners went to Ukraine, Ukrainians would even be like, eh, just learn Russian. It makes more sense for you. But since the full-scale invasion, Russian's a very—some people still speak it, but there's a lot of people, it's really, in a very visceral way, a very triggering thing for them. Even if it's their first language. I know so many people whose first language was Russian growing up, and they refuse to speak a word of it because it's too painful.
And so now, since I'm learning Ukrainian and not Russian, if I speak even a little bit, like, my normal coffee order, if I'm with colleagues or friends, I'll just say latte da Vipassana, and they'll be like, oh, my goodness, she's a Ukrainian. She's fluent. She's amazing. It's really sweet.
DN: How do Ukrainians—do they view you as the American?
KB: I think it's definitely not an across-the-board thing. Since I live there and have lived there for three years, I have these strong relationships and they know me and they know that I'm not this, like, white savior, that I'm there to—as Whitworth taught me, that the people on the ground come first, and that I'm just there to help fill in the gaps. They don't view me as, like, the foreigner. Honestly, after the election and after Inauguration Day this year, I went into the office, and my colleagues gave me a hug, and they said, we welcome our American refugees. And so, yeah, they know.
DN: So what is your work like as a Ukrainian, as a human rights lawyer in Ukraine? What do you focus on? Who do you represent?
KB: We're there as kind of consultants, I guess you could say. We work directly with the prosecutor's offices in Ukraine, the domestic prosecutors and we have working relationships with all of them. We have different regional teams, of which I'm on one of them. And we have a couple of thematic teams as well for children, environment, and CRS, conflict-related sexual violence.
And so we have relationships with these prosecutors. If they have questions about different elements of war crimes or modes of liability, things that you don't really interact with in domestic law, then they'll ask us, and we'll give them our expertise and answer.
So we work war crimes and war crimes are international crimes that have a nexus to war. It's shellings. It's occupation-related crimes. So when Russia was occupying different areas, and when they're still occupying areas, the Russian soldiers would do things like rape or torture or et cetera. Those are the crimes that we're prosecuting. So not like your normal theft, murder, whatever.
DN: So what drew you to this work?
KB: I came into Whitworth knowing that I wanted to be an international human rights lawyer. I was super focused on human trafficking at the time. And then over the course of the seven, eight years of my education, I kind of realized that it was more of a symptom. Human trafficking is more of a symptom than a cause.
So, for instance, Russia is trafficking thousands of children right now, right, from Ukraine into Russia. I was a philosophy major, so I wanted to get to the root of everything. I wanted to find the cause and fight against the cause rather than the symptom. And that led me to broader international human rights. And then in law school, I had a mentor who was a law professor and focused on international humanitarian law. It was my perspective that people in war are very frequently the most vulnerable, so deserve the most of my energy to protect. They're vulnerable enough that I think it's people in war deserve our protection and our efforts to get justice for.
DN: How do you think Americans perceive this war? And are they getting an accurate view of what's truly going on in Kyiv?
KB: It's hard for me to say because I'm not in the middle of it. These last three years, I haven't really been in the States as much.
I think that there is broad support for Ukraine, but I think compassion fatigue is a real thing. And, you know, even if people still have the stickers on their phone or whatever, I think it's easy to forget. There's so much going on right now and it's easy to forget and it's easy to get distracted by other global and domestic atrocities. So I guess I can't really say.
I know very firsthand that a lot of people do believe a lot of lies, pro-Russian lies, because Russian propaganda is really, truly incredible and very insidious and very everywhere. I mean, even in my own family, family members will say that they heard something about Russia and Ukraine and there's so many times where I have to say, that's just not true.
Anything that claims that life under Russian occupation is good, it's not true. Like, I wish it was, but that's—my entire work is prosecuting the war crimes that—most of which happen under Russian occupation. They're being denied passports. They're being denied water. They're being systematically targeted and tortured and raped and killed.
If it's saying that life is better under Russian occupation, that's a big red flag. No actual person without a gun to their head is saying that.
