Expert Roundtable:
Russia Referendum in Donbas and Reintegration of Donbas and Crimea into Ukraine
Event Description
PILPG and Ropes & Gray hosted a conversation with experts regarding the Russian intention to hold a referendum in the Ukrainian region of Donbas and its subsequent annexation, as well as the legal status of Donbas and Crimea.
Tensions between Russia and Ukraine have been rising since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. The first military outbreak between both countries began in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea through a fraudulent referendum and an armed conflict erupted in Ukraine's eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.
On February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A month into the invasion, Russia pulled back from Kyiv and focused its attention on seizing Ukraine's eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk and creating a land corridor along the south coast. On June 7, 2022, Russia claimed that it had opened a land corridor to Russian-occupied Crimea, allowing civilians and goods to pass through the eastern Ukrainian territory now under its control. In the summer of 2022, reports emerged of Russia’s intention to hold a referendum in Donbas, which encompasses the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, with the intention to annex this area into Russian territory.
During this event, our panelists, Anna Ovdiienko, Ievgenii Iaroshenko, Timothy Waters, and Mandy Cheung, discussed the legal issues surrounding the intention to hold this referendum, the legal status of Donbas and Crimea, and their full reintegration into Ukraine. This event will be moderated by PILPG Founder Paul Williams.
This event is part of the PILPG Thought Leadership Initiative. The Initiative focuses on prominent international law and international affairs topics and organizes monthly expert roundtables to share expertise and reflections from our work on peace negotiations, post-conflict constitution drafting, and atrocity crimes prosecution. This expert roundtable is part of our Ukraine Series, a series which aims to discuss recent developments in the Ukraine-Russia war, ponder complex legal questions related to those developments, and inform audiences of important international legal principles. As part of this series, PILPG holds expert roundtables every other Friday from 12-1 pm Eastern Time.
Access recordings of the event below in Ukrainian and English:
Speakers
Hanna Ovdiienko
Ms. Hanna Ovdiienko is a legal expert of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. She is also a practicing criminal lawyer, representing the most vulnerable categories of applicants. Ms. Ovdiienko also successfully cooperates with the European Court of Human Rights. The Court is already considering more than 100 applications in which she acts as a representative. In more than 20 such applications, the European Court has already found violations of human rights. In addition, Hanna Ovdienko was the co-author of three submissions to the International Criminal Court, the Shadow Report to the CAT and reports to the periodic mechanisms of the United Nations. She is engaged in coaching, being a trainer at events for lawyers, judges, and human rights defenders. Currently, her activities are focused on documenting war crimes, collecting evidence of their commission, and preparing individual and group cases for international mechanisms.
Ievgenii Iaroshenko
Ievgenii Iaroshenko is an analyst and advocacy officer at CrimeaSOS, a leading Ukrainian NGO which monitors developments in Crimea and provides various types of assistance to victims of human rights violations in the occupied territory. Ievgenii monitors violations of human rights, international humanitarian law, war crimes and crimes against humanity in occupied Crimea. In particular, he contributed to thematic reports on enforced disappearances in Crimea, detention conditions of Crimean political prisoners and Crimea’s environmental deterioration. He also advocates Crimean issues at international level and is a member of the Crimea Platform Expert Network.
Previously, Ievgenii worked at Ukrainian think tanks (International Centre for Policy Studies, Democracy House) where he analyzed developments in Donbas and Crimea.
Mandy Cheung
Wingman (Mandy) Cheung is an associate in the health care group at Ropes & Gray LLP. Mandy's practice focuses on a wide range of regulatory and corporate issues faced by a diverse group of clients, including hospitals and academic medical centers. Before joining the firm, Mandy worked in a system of academic and teaching hospitals where she advised clients
on a variety of legal issues, including privacy, academic research, regulatory and physician arrangements. Most recently, as in-house
counsel, Mandy helped her clients understand and navigate emergency policy changes during COVID-19. As part of her pro bono work, Mandy successfully represented a client
in a family law matter through the Family Law Project for Domestic Abuse Survivors at the Women’s Bar Foundation. During law school,
Mandy was the lead article editor for the Journal of Health and Biomedical Law as well as a participant of the Health Care Moot Court Team. Prior to law school, Mandy worked as a senior radiation therapist in the cancer center of a large academic medical center in Boston.
Timothy William Waters
Timothy William Waters is a professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law. His writes and teaches on the laws of war, international criminal law, secession, and changes in states’ borders.
He is the author of Boxing Pandora: Rethinking Borders, States, and Secession in a Democratic World (Yale 2020) and editor of The Milosevic Trial: An Autopsy (Oxford 2013). He is a frequent contributor to policy debate on international law and politics. He has published extensively in leading journals of international law and international relations, including at Yale, Harvard, NYU, Virginia, Duke, Stanford, and George Washington. His op-eds on Iraq, Ukraine, the Balkans, and international justice, as well as gun rights and public discourse in America, have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Völkerrechtsblog, Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy.
A graduate of UCLA, Columbia, and Harvard, he has held fellowships at Harvard Law School, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and visited at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. Beside teaching at Indiana, he has visited at Boston University, the University of Mississippi, Bard College and Central European University in Budapest.
Prior to becoming an academic Waters worked as a consultant on legal system reform for the Open Society Institute, and on ethnic discrimination for Human Rights Watch; as a researcher at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia; as a human rights officer in Bosnia for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe; and as a Peace Corps volunteer in Hungary where he helped open a high school for Roma/Gypsies and founded a nationwide English-language drama festival.
MODERATOR
Dr. Paul R. Williams
Dr. Paul R. Williams holds the Rebecca I. Grazier Professorship in Law and International Relations at American University where he teaches in the School of International Service and at the Washington College of Law. Dr. Williams is also the co-founder of the Public International Law & Policy Group (PILPG), a pro bono law firm providing legal assistance to states and governments involved in peace negotiations, post-conflict constitution drafting, and the prosecution of war criminals. As a world renowned peace negotiation lawyer, Dr. Williams has assisted over two dozen parties in major international peace negotiations and has advised numerous parties on the drafting and implementation of post-conflict constitutions. Several of Dr. Williams' pro bono government clients throughout the world joined together to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Dr. Williams has served as a Senior Associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as an Attorney-Adviser for European and Canadian affairs at the U.S. Department of State, Office of the Legal Adviser. He received his J.D. from Stanford Law School and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. Dr. Williams is a sought-after international law and policy expert. He is frequently interviewed by major print and broadcast media and regularly contributes op-eds to major newspapers. Dr. Williams has authored six books on various topics concerning international law, and has published over three dozen scholarly articles on topics of international law and policy. He has testified before the U.S. Congress on a number of occasions relating to specific peace processes, transitional justice, and self-determination. Dr. Williams is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, and has served as a Counsellor on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law. In 2019, Paul was awarded the Cox International Law Center's Humanitarian Award for Advancing Global Justice. More information about Dr. Williams can be found at www.drpaulrwilliams.com.