Khrystyna Kozak, a human rights lawyer specializing in displacement, was working for a nongovernmental humanitarian organization in Kyiv, Ukraine, on the morning of Feb. 24, 2022, when Russian forces invaded the country from multiple directions, sparking a brutal war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and deepened geopolitical fault lines around the globe.

Three years later, Kozak is now at the University of Notre Dame, where she is pursuing a Master of Global Affairs with a concentration in international peace studies from the Keough School of Global Affairs. Following a recent stint in The Hague, she is working to hold Russia accountable for its actions.

As part of the requirement for peace studies students, Kozak recently completed a six-month internship in the Dutch city with the Register of Damage for Ukraine — an effort on the part of dozens of nations to account for recorded instances of damage, loss and injury from the ongoing conflict.

For Kozak, who was born and raised in Ukraine and whose family and friends still live there, it was a deeply personal undertaking, a way of helping to preserve the future of Ukraine without actually picking up arms.

“It is a coping mechanism,” Kozak said by video conference from the Netherlands in October. She has since returned to Notre Dame to finish her degree program. “I only want to work for the cause of Ukraine.”

As one of a handful of Ukrainians working for the register, Kozak was responsible for screening and evaluating claims and evidence submitted via Diia, a government-backed app that she and other Ukrainians use for a variety of state-sponsored functions.

“I’m super happy, but the work is super intense,” Kozak said, comparing it to her time in corporate law, but with the added stress of war.

Still, she considers herself “super privileged” because, as a woman, she can travel outside of Ukraine with relative ease. Men, including her husband, a lawyer in Kyiv, must remain in the country under a mobilization order designed to bolster the military. Kozak noted that, with few exceptions, men ages 18 to 60 qualify for military service. “Even my father, who is 59, cannot easily cross the border.”

Like most Ukrainians, Kozak views the war in existential terms.

“It’s not a war about territory,” she said. “We’re fighting for our identity, for our right to live in our own country, to speak our own language, to not switch to Russian.”

Where does the field of peace studies fit into that equation?

It’s a good question, Kozak said, and one she gets a lot.

“I think a lot of people are super skeptical of what I’m studying,” she said.

Still, she is of the mind that an understanding of violence and its root causes is fundamental to resolving the current conflict in a way that guarantees a measure of justice for Ukraine and its people.

A ledger of loss

Established by the Council of Europe in 2023, the Register of Damage is charged with accounting for recorded instances of torture, inhumane treatment and sexual violence, vast destruction of residential buildings and critical infrastructure, immense economic losses and other ill effects of Russia’s aggression. The organization’s work is a first step toward justice and compensation for Ukraine and its people.

Under its narrow mandate from the Council of Europe, the register receives claims, Kozak said, but it does not award compensation. For that, a separate claims commission will need to be established.

“The role model for the claims commission primarily is the United Nations Compensation Commission, which was established by the Security Council when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991,” Kozak said. In that case, she said, Iraq paid full compensation to Kuwait and its citizens.

The UN also established a register of damage related to the construction of the wall in occupied Palestinian territory. No compensation has been paid in that case.

Still, the simple act of acknowledging the physical damage wrought by conflict is important on its own, said Clemens Sedmak, professor of social ethics and director of the Keough School’s Nanovic Institute for European Studies.

He framed the issue in three dimensions.

“One is, you want to do something, and since you cannot stop the war or force reparations, documentation is a kind of agency you can exercise,” he said.

Secondly, he said, “It’s a matter of honoring what is happening and remembering that memory is a very strong force — and a very strong political force.”

Finally, “Once you have documentation and the war ends, and it has to end at some point, you can use that to try to get something (in exchange for) the damage in terms of compensation, reparations, restoration,” he said.

Common perspectives

Kozak’s work with the Register of Damage was part of the internship portion of her peace studies concentration — a cornerstone of the concentration (since upgraded to a major) that gives students the opportunity to think in new ways about theories they have learned in the classroom and to consider the challenges raised by practical situations they encounter on the ground.

As part of the Keough School, the peace studies major within the Master of Global Affairs program is administered by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, a leading center for the study of violent conflict and strategies for sustainable peace.

Norbert Koppensteiner is the director of the major.

“Peace studies looks at some of the complex issues around questions of war, of violence, of conflict and then, also, how to achieve long-term, sustainable solutions” to conflict, said Koppensteiner, an associate teaching professor of peace studies. “So questions like social justice, questions like reconciliation, questions like peace processes that happen either before, after or during the hot phase of a conflict — all of these are crucial topics for peace studies.”

Unsurprisingly, Koppensteiner said, the major tends to attract students from conflict areas, students with previous experience in peacebuilding or related topics and with a real stake in the subject.

“Of course what’s going on in Ukraine at the moment really is something that, at least in the European context, we haven’t seen in quite some time — two national armies clashing, one country really invading another country,” he said. “On all levels, it is absolutely concerning and traumatic, and of course this also reflects in Khrystyna’s personal experiences and biography and commitment toward ending the suffering. In that sense, it’s a very unique situation.”

On the other hand, Koppensteiner said, “Many of our students come from conflict areas. There always is a very personal reason why people end up in peace and conflict work and where this motivation to make peace in the world comes from. So, we also have in our cohort students from Afghanistan, from Uganda, from very often Burundi or the Congo, really from some of the hot conflict areas in the world. This is what brings people here.”

It’s also what makes the “richness” of the peace studies space so profound, he said.

“When you are fighting as the Ukrainian population is fighting ... the idea of compromise is not very appealing ... But peacebuilding almost always requires some type of compromise. After all, you don’t make peace with your friends; you make peace with your enemies.”

“Everybody comes with their own background, everybody comes with their own story, so students in the end learn more from each other than they ever could in the classroom,” he said.

That counts for Kozak as much as anyone, he said.

“I have a lot of respect for how she articulates the situation (in Ukraine), how she helps others, including myself, understand what’s happening, and how she’s just committed to the cause,” he said.

Said Kozak, “I’m always trying to present the case for Ukraine and share what’s going on there with my classmates.”

From a programmatic perspective, Koppensteiner described the peace studies major as “unique” because of its dual focus on theory and practice.

“It’s really something that sets us apart,” he said. “We want to give our students the opportunity to work in a new context, directly with an organization. Get firsthand experience on the one hand and then, also, have the possibility parallel to that to really do on-site research for their capstone projects and build out their networks with international organizations.”

‘Many of my friends have already died’

Now 28, Kozak has been in or around conflict nearly half of her life.

She was a teenager studying law at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014, leading to wider conflict with Russia in the nearby Donbas.

She graduated from Taras Shevchenko in 2017, and then enrolled in Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU), where she earned her master’s degree in law.

Following a stint as a human rights lawyer, Kozak was working as a legal consultant for the Norwegian Refugee Council in 2022 when Russia invaded.

Wanting to assist directly with humanitarian efforts once the war was underway, she joined the UN in June 2022, first as a program policy officer with the World Food Program and then as a national development officer with the UN Refugee Agency.

All the while, she kept thinking about ways to broaden her understanding of transitional justice, to move beyond a mere legal framework and toward a more holistic approach to conflict resolution in complex and dynamic environments such as Ukraine.

Ultimately, this led her 5,000 miles across the ocean to Notre Dame, which maintains close ties to Ukraine through UCU, a longstanding partner in academic, religious and cultural collaboration and exchange.

Encouraged by Svitlana Khyliuk, director of the UCU law school and a former visiting fellow at Notre Dame, Kozak applied to the master of global affairs program in December 2022 and was accepted the following March, despite difficulties navigating the application process due to ongoing missile strikes and associated power and internet outages in Kyiv.

She arrived in South Bend that August, just as the combined number of Russian and Ukrainian troop deaths and injuries was nearing a grim milestone: 500,000.

Today, that number stands at nearly 1 million by some estimates.

And that’s just the military toll.

According to the United Nations, since the start of the invasion, more than 42,000 civilians have been killed or injured, including thousands of women and children — though that’s likely an undercount. Millions of homes and buildings have been destroyed. Roads and highways have been bulldozed and bombed. Access to food and shelter is scarce. The same goes for electricity. Russian soldiers routinely torture and execute civilians.

According to the UN Refugee Agency, about a third of Ukrainians have fled the fighting, with about 3.7 million displaced within the country and another 6.9 million living abroad — the largest population displacement in Europe since World War II.

Like nearly all Ukrainians, Kozak has lost friends in the war.

“Almost all of my friends are serving, and many of my friends have already died,” she said.

Amid such sacrifice, and with support for the war flagging in the West, increasing numbers of Ukrainians favor a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible, according to recent polling from Gallup.

Still, large numbers of Ukrainians chafe at the notion, viewing it as an affront to those who have sacrificed so much for the country, who have served and in many cases died defending its democratic freedoms, its territorial sovereignty, its very existence.

This is understandable, Koppensteiner said.

“When you are fighting as the Ukrainian population is fighting at the moment, the idea of compromise is not very appealing. But at the same time, we have to recognize, taking a step back and looking at it a bit from a distance, that peacebuilding almost always requires some type of compromise,” he said. “Oftentimes, neither side completely gets what they want, and reconciliation involves coming to grips with that. After all, you don’t make peace with your friends; you make peace with your enemies.”

‘So much to do’

Now back in the United States, Kozak is working on her capstone project in peace studies, drawing on her experience with the Register of Damage and her own research. She spent a portion of her time in The Hague exploring the history of truth-seeking and documentation as a form of justice, leading her to critically examine the distinction between truth-seeking and truth-telling. This, in turn, has led her to question why institutions prioritize one mandate over the other, and whether these mandates have the potential to be combined.

As a result, she said, her research “has evolved to focus on the question: Should the Register of Damages for Ukraine contribute to or even transform into a truth-telling and memory project/body alongside its documentation mandate? And if so, when would be the appropriate time for it to do so?”

In addition to completing her capstone project, she is preparing for an upcoming conference — the first of its kind at Notre Dame — dedicated to the ethics and politics of hope in contemporary Ukraine. A collaboration between the Nanovic Institute and UCU, the 2025 Ukrainian studies conference will take place in early March and explore the theme “Revolutions of Hope: Resilience and Recovery in Ukraine.” One of Kozak’s roles at the conference will be serving on a panel titled “Culture War: Soft Power, Memory and Identity in the Fight for Ukraine.”

The conference will mark the inauguration of the Ukrainian Studies Hub at Notre Dame, a campus-wide initiative aimed at bringing together scholars and students focused on Ukraine from a variety of disciplines — from anthropology and political science to Ukrainian language, history, religion and culture, among other fields.

“I am extremely proud that Notre Dame has launched the Ukrainian Studies Hub and organized this conference with such high-level speakers to draw attention to Ukraine,” Kozak said. “For a long time, Ukraine has been understudied or grouped together with Russia within traditional Russian-German departments worldwide, often through a colonial lens. This conference is an important step toward giving a platform to voices that, for centuries, lacked the opportunity to narrate their own stories independently. It’s a vital moment for Ukraine to take its rightful place in global academic and cultural discourse.”

In addition to the Nanovic Institute and UCU, co-sponsors of the conference include the Kroc Institute, the Notre Dame Democracy Initiative, Notre Dame Global, the Office of the President, the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and the Department of German, Slavic and Eurasian Studies.

“The conference will be valuable in itself as a conference because it brings people together, but it should also have an afterlife,” Sedmak said. “And the afterlife will not only be publications — we’re interested in that, of course — but it will be the connections that we can use as we build up our Ukrainian studies.”

Through the participation of Ukrainians themselves, it will also help to put a face on the conflict.

“A person like Khrystyna will remind us: This is not an impartial, low-stakes kind of situation,” Sedmak said. “We are talking about human lives; we are talking about the destruction of homes. And having a witness who is very close to what’s happening on the ground, a person who is emotionally involved and has this very deep existential commitment (to Ukraine) gives both the conference and our aspirations for the Ukrainian Studies Hub the credibility and depth that we need.”

Looking ahead, Kozak hopes to return to the Register of Damage and, ultimately, to Ukraine as well.

“There is so much to do in Ukraine, even to rebuild it,” she said. “I will spend my whole life (contributing to the cause of Ukraine) and not even contribute 1 percent because the scale of destruction is so much.”