The ongoing Kremlin-inspired armed conflict in eastern Ukraine has set a number of tasks before lawyers and human rights defenders – in particular, the need for clearer formulation of problematic issues revealed in course of documentation of war crimes and gross violations of human rights and better justification of claims against the guilty parties. The hybrid warfare makes this task even more difficult, since the aggressor state refuses to acknowledge its presence in Donbas, diligently concealing its role in the conflict. Hence, the fact that Russia has been controlling the illegal armed groups of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk/Luhansk People’s Republics” needs to be proven by Ukraine in the international judicial bodies, unlike the situation in Crimea, over territory of which Russia has already declared its responsibility.

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