For Anastasiya Donets, a lawyer with the Brussels-based International Partnership for Human Rights, it won’t be enough for the fighting to stop in her native Ukraine.

There will have to be justice as well as peace, Donets told a friendly audience at Bates College last week. Without bringing war criminals to court, she said, dictators around the world will know that they can do whatever they want without consequences.

For Donets, it’s personal. Ukraine’s second-largest city, where she lived and studied for 27 years, has been the target of a steady stream of attacks since the ongoing Russian invasion began in February 2022.

“It is one of the most shelled cities in Ukraine,” Donets said of Kharkiv, a place of “constant danger” that endures a dozen air raids daily.

The building where she studied law is a wreck today. The bar where she relaxed after hours, a place called Hemingway’s that featured a fish mounted on the wall, was blown to bits. Everywhere are the ruins of the life Kharkiv’s residents once enjoyed.

Ukrainians get little sleep, Donets told the audience, because Russia keeps the skies buzzing with armed drones all night.

During the day, little drones fly around that are too small to have any military use, Donets said. Instead, these devices are “literally hunting civilians” who can be badly hurt or killed by the tiny bombs they deploy.

This goes beyond the normal cruelty and waste of war. The deliberate slaughter of innocents is a tactic of tyrants, a betrayal of everything decent people stand for.

Yet Russia continues “conducting a war against Ukrainian civilians,” as Donets put it.

She and other human rights investigators are working to interview survivors and secure evidence that is already being used to bring cases against the perpetrators of some of the war crimes.

It’s difficult, dangerous work.

Donets’ group has helped issue detailed reports about the abduction of Ukrainian children as well as the confinement, torture, rape and murder of civilians. The details, which are piling up as cases are made against the responsible Russians, are sickening.

Thankfully, not every story they hear is awful.

One Russian man in occupied territory used to help Ukrainian artillery zero in on Russian positions, simply by phoning them. When the occupiers came looking for him, Donets said, he threw his phone in a pot of borscht so they couldn’t find it.

The work that Donets and other activists are doing to push for human rights in Ukraine had plenty of help from the United States and European governments since the start of the war, but it’s fading. President Trump’s press secretary said Monday he’s “grown weary and frustrated” with both Russia and Ukraine — as if victim and perpetrator have the same responsibility for the ongoing clash — and he often seems dismissive of the Ukrainian cause.

Donets said budget cuts since the new administration came to power in Washington “have hit us badly” and reduced the ability of investigators to compile evidence that can bring abusers to justice someday.

“Everyone wants the war to be over,” Donets said, but “it’s very important to understand that it hasn’t happened yet and it’s dangerous to relax now. We’re still in the middle of it.”

And the United States, credited with holding war criminals responsible with the trials held in Tokyo and Nuremberg after World War II, ought to stand by Ukraine instead of letting some of the worst crimes of our era go not just unpunished, but unrecorded.

If we want peace, we need justice, too.