Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has warned against striking a deal with Russia to end the Ukraine War that does not hold the instigators of the 2022 Ukrainian invasion and perpetrators of war crimes to account.
“Everybody would hope that the war in Ukraine could come to an end, and the unjustified suffering of the Ukrainian people could be ended,” Clinton told an event at the pro-democracy Cinema for Peace World Forum in Berlin on Monday.
“But there is no peace without justice; there’s no peace without accountability, and there is no peace without every effort undertaken to end the impunity of those who ordered this invasion and those who perpetuated the killings and the war crime.”
She was speaking on the eve of U.S. President Donald Trump’s telephone meeting today with Russia’s Vladimir Putin aimed at brokering a deal to end the conflict. Trump has suggested that Ukraine, which is not the aggressor, will have to make territorial concessions and share energy assets in return for peace.
Russia is currently occupying around 20% of Ukraine in a conflict which began after 2014 democracy demonstrations ousted pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. Russian reacted by annexing Crimea and then backing separatists in the eastern Ukrainian Donbas region, followed by a full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022.
Clinton was speaking in a Q&A for UK director and cinematographer Laura Warner’s Ukrainian war crime documentary The Cranes Call, organized at the French embassy in Berlin as part of the World Forum running until March 19.
Shot in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s April 2022 retreat from northern Ukraine and the outskirts of Kyiv, the documentary follows international human rights lawyer Anya Neistat and Ukrainian war crimes researcher Solomiia Stasiv as they travel villages and towns that were occupied by Russian troops documenting war crimes.
Anya Neistat and Solomiia in The Cranes Call
They hear accounts of gang rape; a torture chamber set up in a local school; families wiped out by indiscriminate missile attacks, and the murder of Ukrainian poet and children’s writer Volodymyr Vakulenko.
The team and film crew steer clear of the frontline, but the war is ever present as Russia continues its campaign of indiscriminate missile attacks on civilian areas.
“We rode in off the back of the first wave of the war. We would go from village to village to village to village, and in every single one of those villages, some of them we all know the names of, Bucha, for example, there would be this catastrophic number of casualties, or victims of torture or survivors of rape,” recounted Warner, who joined Clinton onstage alongside Neistat and Stasiv.
“It’s almost impossible to comprehend how many individuals have been touched by this war in a really detrimental fashion. What we wanted to do was just make people understand the real human toll. We brought to life maybe four examples. These are four of over 140,000 people.”
The Cranes Call is a produced by HiddenLight Productions – the company Clinton created with daughter Chelsea Clinton and Sam Branson in 2020 – in association with Cinema for Peace and social impact producer Minderoo.
Clinton said Neistat’s investigation had immediately struck a chord with the HiddenLight team.
“We try to tell stories that really go to the heart of what’s actually happening in the world today,” she said. “When we learned about what Anya was doing… that she and a team would be on the ground in Ukraine documenting war crimes, it struck us that that was a story that had to be told, in all of its pain and heroism and grittiness, and that’s what I think the film does, because this is really hard work,” she said.
“We know how difficult it is to document war crimes and crimes against humanity, but we also know that if we don’t try, we will never know what happened and the people who are represented in this film, who represent so many, many people, not just in Ukraine but across the world, will never have a chance to even hope for some kind of justice and to end impunity.”
Neistat gave an update on her investigations and cases which have been filed with German and Austrian federal prosecutors as well as the United Nations’ Human Rights Committee.
“It’s not easy because the perpetrators are not in the country. It’s very difficult for any prosecutor to actively pursue a case, but we insist that there are ways of doing it. We’re asking for sealed arrest warrants so that these perpetrators can be apprehended and extradited,” she explained.
In the face of slow progress, Neistat said she held onto the fact that the process was allowing people to participate in the act of seeking justice.
“People understand the notion of justice everywhere, in Ukraine, in every other war zone where I’ve worked. Surprisingly, they understand what it takes and how long it takes. They don’t expect immediate results and they’re willing to walk this road with us to make sure that it doesn’t happen again, and that possibly, they will see their perpetrators face trials.”
Both Neistat and Clinton emphasised the fact that the war crimes committed in Ukraine were part of a larger pattern of behavior by Russian military units also witnessed in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria, a point that is also brought up in the documentary.
“If you look at what first the Wagner army and now the Russian Military is doing in Africa, there is a direct line to Putin and the Kremlin and a direct line to a lot of these commanders in the field,” said Clinton.
“You can look at intelligence photos and see the same people in Chechnya, in Georgia, in 2014 in Ukraine, in Syria, and now again in Ukraine. Anyone who tries to claim that you can stop Russia by conceding to Russia in Ukraine is ignoring the history of war criminals, from the Kremlin to the ground, and we, meaning Europe and at least half of the United States, will pay a terrible price if there is not some recognition of the connectivity among all of these military incursions,” she continued.
“Anyone in Europe, or in any position of any responsibility anywhere, who thinks that impunity would be stopped with a cease fire and concessions, doesn’t understand this history and doesn’t understand the psychology of the people calling the shots inside Russia.”
The Cranes Call world premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last June, but Clinton said that nine months on the documentary had gained fresh relevance amid the geo-political developments of recent weeks.
“This film should be mandatory viewing for anybody in any position in the United States or Europe or elsewhere who thinks that they could be a part of ending the war but ending the war in a way that recognizes Ukraine’s sovereignty and the Ukrainian people’s right to be free and to have their nation respected and recognized and integrated into Europe with whatever security they need going forward,” she said.
HiddenLight is currently doubling down on efforts to get the film seen. Alongside bespoke screenings at events like the World Forum, the company has just struck a deal with direct-to-consumer film and event platform Gathr aimed at getting the film out to wider audience.
Warner said that outside of Channel 4, which backed and broadcast the film in the UK, it had been difficult to get streamers and broadcasters on board.
“They’re quite scared in this climate to pick up on this political material,” she said, adding that she hoped the film’s performance on Gathr would prove there is an audience for this type of documentary.
Monday night’s Q&A followed Trump’s moves over the weekend to dismantle federally-funded news outlet Voice of America as well as his attacks on mainstream news outlets CNN and MSNBC. Questioned on what role HiddenLight Production can play in an era when mainstream media outlets are under pressure, Clinton suggested the world was at a pivotal point in terms of information.
“We are in a struggle over whether we will live in a truth-based world or not,” she said. “There are very powerful forces at work in the world who want us to believe in an alternative reality than what we actually see in front of us, what we actually know happened. They want to destroy a common basis of truth, facts and evidence. By destroying that, they destroy trust. And by destroying trust, they destroy democracy
She said HiddenLight, in partnership with outfits like Cinema for Peace and Minderoo, was doing what it could to tell fact-based stories, showing a slice of real life, but that the key challenge was getting streamers and broadcasters to engage and partner on this sort of storytelling.
“They’re worried about the politics. They’re worried about attacks. There are so many bots coming out of Kremlin-linked organisations… attacking anyone who is trying to talk about what is really happening. They don’t want to be attacked, or be quote, political, even though they’re telling a fact based truthful story to the best of their ability to do so,” she said.
“This is a much bigger issue, even bigger than the war in Ukraine, which is huge and horrible. But truly what’s at stake is whether we will live in a fact based reality or not. And when you have leaders from the Kremlin to the White House rewriting history for their own political and personal reasons, then we have to stand against it.”
