After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?

Reporting from Ukraine, veteran war correspondent Janine Di Giovanni describes an urgent campaign to collect evidence of russian war crimes that might stand up in court against Putin, his commanders, and their troops

- By Janine Di Giovanni

I am an academic and a writer. I am a human rights adviser. I am a mother. But at heart, I am a war reporter. I have covered some 18 wars over the past 35 years.

On a brittle February morning, preparing for a class I was teaching at Yale which dissected four murderous conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone-I first heard the news of Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. I know Putin's tactics of war very well, so I knew I had to find my way to Ukraine and begin documenting atrocities. But I wanted to go with a different mission than my usual beat as a reporter. I felt I needed to be working at the center of the war crimes investigations that would inevitably be mobilized.But first, I need to tell you about Tata and the red tulips.

RED TULIPS

It never gets easier. You sit in a broken house, in an overgrown field, or at a shattered kitchen table. You sit with someone's wife, or parent, or sister, brother, friend. You listen to how the person they loved was dragged off, how they never came home.

The person recounting the story tells you about the day their whole life ended when their loved one was taken away. You listen. You watch the speaker intensely. They are still alive, their bodies still move, they eat, drink, walk. But their grief has frozen them in an anguish so palpable, they seem more dead than alive.