Symposium on Advancing Effective and Comprehensive Reparation for Victims of the War in Ukraine: Reparations for the War in Ukraine – Taking a Long-View

[Professor Luke Moffett is chair of human rights and international humanitarian law at Queen’s University Belfast. He is author of Justice for Victims before the International Criminal Court (Routledge 2014), Reparations and War (OUP 2023), and Algorithms of War (BUP 2026)]

As the war in Ukraine drags into its fifth year (or thirteenth if you look back to Russia’s original invasion), there seems to be no end in sight. Indeed the past year witnessed the highest number of Ukrainian civilian casualties, with 2025 being the deadliest year, likely only to be surpassed by 2026 if ongoing drone attacks against civilians continue. For those who have suffered from Russia’s aggression, the need for reparations to repair their harm remains an acute issue. This post considers the place of reparations in the war in Ukraine, the difficulties of time and how to strategise about a longer view on delivering reparations to the victims of the armed conflict.

Prompt Reparations?

International human rights law has consistently stipulated that states must provide adequate, effective and prompt reparation for harm suffered. Yet most reparation programmes are usually established after the end of hostilities, often years or decades later. This can compound victims’ harm, as well as consequences for their families and communities. The indicative research that has been conducted on the impacts of war on health and social cohesion indicates that delays in repairing the harm in the aftermath of violence create cascading and reverberating harm on families and communities. This has been seen in other contexts, such as Northern Ireland, where despite nearly 30 years of peace, the country is still dealing with high levels of PTSD, suicide and poverty from thousands being killed and tens of thousands injured. Delaying reparations disrupts people’s quality of life and dignified existence resulting in irreparable harm and multi-generational trauma.

While we can say reparations should be delivered sooner rather than later, the reality facing Ukraine dictates otherwise. The war continues to see tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers fight every day for their country’s continued existence. There is no good time for redressing the harm in the face of such existential threat, nor resources to adequately and effectively remedy such suffering. The pragmatism of establishing reparations programmes in peacetime can allow for institutional capacity to deal with a fixed victim population, return of those displaced and security guarantees. Reparations should be started during ongoing hostilities, though the experience of other contexts such as Colombia and Iraq, point to this as a continuing struggle, but not one that can be shirked.

Despite the bleak outlook for the end of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, there have been remarkable multilateral efforts to ensure reparations for victims of the war that have not been made elsewhere. In May 2023 the Council of Europe established the Register of Damage to record evidence and determine the eligibility of victims’ claims for the damage, loss or injury caused by Russia’s aggression on the territory of Ukraine. By April 2026, the Register had received over 145,000 claims, with 6-10 million total claims expected. 

While the Register cannot award reparations, the Council of Europe in December 2025 approved the convention for the establishment of the International Claims Commission for Ukraine to assess compensation claims. The EU and 35 countries signed the convention creating the Commission, but only six states including Ukraine have ratified it (including Ireland and Canada in the past week, with the EU, UK, and Norway in the coming weeks); at least 25 states must ratify the convention in order to activate it. Even if the Commission was established tomorrow, compensation awarded through it is to be paid by Russia, not member states. The Commission could operate with member states’ and voluntary contributions, including using frozen Russian assets, but the latter remains legally circumspect and politically fraught with the threat of Russian counter-measures. 

A more fundamental problem is the scope of reparations on the basis of three parameters of the scope of such a commission– compensation, violations (material scope), and after the February 2022 invasion (temporal scope). With the first of these, compensation, as Grotius said, “money is the common measure of valuable things”, but it is not adequate to remedy the harm caused by thirteen years of war where whole cities, towns and villages have been obliterated, families and communities scattered to the wind, and practices such as rape, torture, and murder of civilians and detainees systematically employed. It is why the 2005 UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation outline the five complementary measures of reparations of restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, measures of satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition, to be delivered together to ensure a comprehensive remedy. 

What amounts to a violation, especially of international humanitarian law, may be contentious. A more inclusive terminology of ‘conflict-related harm’ would encompass both lawful and unlawful harm, which would be beyond the current scope of the Register and Commission. Given the Register of Damage’s limited temporal scope starting only on the date of the 2022 invasion, victims making claims for harms they suffered before this date will not be eligible. This is likely to create difficulties where victims in occupied areas who suffered violations since 2014 do not fit into such neat legal boxes. 

So where does this leave us – do we live in hope for peace and leave aside fundamental rights in the face of war?

Playing the Long-Game 

Having studied historical practices of reparations and victim social movements struggling for reparations, two things become apparent – reparations take (a long) time, and only come about through advocacy and victim mobilisation, not by the charity of those responsible. Ukraine has a strong civil society and widespread support for reparations for the victims of Russia’s aggression. There are lessons to be learnt from other struggles for reparations. Many victims take years or decades to mobilise such attention and political capital, such as the Japanese-Americans who campaigned for nearly forty years. Such a length of time was needed to sensitise victims and the wider society on the necessity of delivering reparations, as well as to put pressure on those responsible to deliver them. 

Taking a long view of reparations can help to reduce the economic, advocacy and social burden of claiming redress on victims when reparations become available. Too often after a long delay from the harm to the delivery of reparations, the consequences are apparent through the loss of evidence to support victims’ claims, worsening of survivors’ physical harm and psychological suffering, and resulting familial, career or relational loss, weakening the social fabric and victims’ social support network, and in turn their resilience.

Ukraine is not starting from scratch. There is strong political capital amongst the Ukrainian government and Western countries to ensure reparations for victims of the war. Over the past few years I have been carrying out training and research to assist the Ukrainian Supreme Court on reparations. My advice since 2022 has underscored that Ukraine should establish its own domestic implementation body for reparations, and claim back the cost from Russia in any future peace settlement. While judges of the Ukrainian Supreme Court have been allowing claims against Russia and Russian assets, such an emotional reaction to ensure their fellow countrypersons can seek justice against their aggressor will likely face the same problems that surfaced in the Germany v Italy Jurisdictional Immunities case at the International Court of Justice. Having a domestic administrative reparation programme would be more sustainable than relying on individual domestic judgments and an international body to provide reparations. A domestic reparations programme would be better situated to deliver comprehensive redress to victims (beyond only compensation), through coordination with local government and municipal bodies. The wisdom of former UN Special Rapporteur on Impunity, Louis Joinet, that “any lasting solution must come from the nation itself”, still rings true. 

For civil society, both in Ukraine and internationally, we need to recalibrate around a long-term strategy for reparations. This does not mean we give up on reparations in the short term; we can still push for interim measures and for a domestic implementation body. But we should be thinking about the longer view in how we can support documentation and evidence efforts (some of which lies with the Register already), and how we can time-proof claims to ensure that they can be inter-operable before different mechanisms (Register and Commission, possibly the European Court of Human Rights, and less likely the International Criminal Court) for enforcement. 

Inter-operability of claims is important as we do not want to be a situation like in Iraq where, when UNITAD pulled out with all its data (much of which was collected by local actors), it could not be used to support claims for reparations by ISIS victims. This is not to say the same will happen with the Register, but if its budget for 2025 was nearly €7.5 million, how long can that budget be sustained? There is some comparable practice of the UN Conciliation Commission, which continues to store records nearly 80 years on from the Nabka in the face of continuing violations against Palestinians.

There is also a role for donors in funding civil society efforts, victim mobilisation, and the provision of informal repair, such as interim reparations that can for a time help stabilise victims’ harm. Together, local and international civil society actors along with international institutions and domestic bodies should seek how best to leverage their respective strengths and coordinate a roadmap for reparations. Support to victims remains critical. As victims are experts in their own harm, experience and how best to remedy it, we should be co-designing reparations in order to ensure a sustainable long-term quality of life for them.

As for the Ukrainian government, it should pay attention to its own international legal obligations. While Ukraine for a time derogated from the right to an effective remedy (2022-2024), the Ukrainian state retains the responsibility to ensure an effective remedy including reparations toward victims within its jurisdiction. A domestic reparations framework can help meet these obligations while reinforcing legitimacy and social cohesion.

We should also consider that if the conflict in Ukraine escalates by Russia continuing its aggression to neighbouring European and NATO countries, how can allies support civilians affected by such violence? A number of militaries are considering that large-scale combat operations are inevitable in the coming years, but this does not mean that civilian harm policies and compensation mechanisms for civilians cannot be planned now. Such future prospects raise important questions about civilian harm mitigation and compensation frameworks. Allied ministries of defence should be considering interoperable claims systems and civilian harm policies. This is not only a matter of legal compliance, but of preparedness to respond to an invasion in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania or Poland and accidental collateral damage to civilians and infrastructure on such territory.

Conclusion

Reparations are very much a site of resistance – both against pernicious impunity and the devaluing of international legal rules and protection. The right to reparations has taken decades of struggle and advocacy to build. While the war grinds on in Ukraine, victims are stuck in remedial purgatory.  The challenges of implementing immediate solutions should not lead to paralysis. A long-view approach—combining interim reparations with sustained investment in documentation, victim mobilisation, domestic capacity, and international coordination—offers a more realistic path forward. 

At the same time, the value of reparations being delivered sooner rather than later still holds a lot of weight. We should be thinking about how to mitigate victims’ suffering in the short-term, rather than having cascading economic, social and health harm. Interim reparations through financial assistance, healthcare support, psychosocial services, and community rebuilding initiatives can help prevent the compounding effects of untreated trauma and economic loss. We can hope that reparations for the war in Ukraine will be resolved within this decade, but we should be prepared for a longer struggle for redress.

Photo attribution: by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash