Igor Lyubashenko - Ukraines Search for Justice in the Shadow of the Donbas Conflict: Strategic Reforms or Crisis Management?

Should wrongdoers be punished? Should society take care of the ones who suffered from wrongdoings? These questions stem from our intuitive and most basic understanding of justice. Common sense tells us that the majority of us would answer these questions affirmatively without much hesitation. However, it is enough to think about the abundance of existing normative systems even without going beyond the civilizational circle of the broadly understood West to quickly learn that, in practice, there are no universally applicable detailed answers to questions like these. In other words, different societies prefer different approaches to the provision of justice in situations when someone breaks the rules of the game established in a given society; not to mention the fact that the rules themselves often appear to be quite diverse.

Things become even more complicated when similar questions are asked in the context of extreme situations, when breaking the rules of the game stops being isolated accidents and turns into a systemic problem. Armed conflicts constitute a perfect though not the only example of such situations. When looking at a conflict retrospectively, historians manage to provide us with convincing explanations of pathways that led to the outbreak of violence; thus, they provide a point of reference for prescribing general responsibility. Things become much more challenging when trying to assess individual acts committed in the fog of war. Conflicts do not happen between angels and demons, but they engage people with their immanent ability to commit evil. 16is inevitably associated with high political stakes. These considerations briefly reflect the scope of problems, which are in the center of attention of the concept of transitional justice. The latter contains both normative considerations and attempts to understand regularities associated with the practice of provision of justice in transgressive moments of history.

This book is devoted to the outlined problem of the provision of justice in the context of armed conflict that emerged in the east of Ukraine at the beginning of 2014. Allow me to remark at the very beginning that the notion of transitional justice does not appear often in the literature fully or partially devoted to Ukraine. The reason is simple: unlike many other post-communist states, Ukraine started implementing policies that could be categorized as transitional justice only in the aftermath of the notorious Euromaidan protests; i.e. at the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014. During the extremely intense and turbulent months that followed, my scientific attention was drawn by these practices, which addressed different types of wrongdoings: the ones committed during the already distant Soviet period, the ones associated with high-level corruption in the post-1991 period, and the ones associated with the mentioned Donbas conflict. As time passed, the latter overshadowed all other dimensions of the Ukrainian transitional justice project. This is not a surprise, considering the urgency of Donbas hostilities and their impact on different aspects of social and political life in Ukraine. Policies designed and implemented by Ukrainian authorities with the aim of addressing injustices generated by the Donbas conflict constitute the main subject of research that became the foundation of this book.