This is an an updated and expanded version from Dr. Clivia von Dewitz’s new book, A Peace Commission for the Russia-Ukraine Conflict. Could South Africa´s Truth Commission Be a Model? The book explores the steps that may be needed to achieve a lasting peace between Ukraine and Russia, with particular emphasis on truth, accountability, reparation and reconciliation.
“There is no way to peace; peace is the way” (A.J. Muste).
Renewed diplomatic efforts to end the war in Ukraine have given new urgency to the question at the heart of this book: what might a lasting peace look like, and how can reconciliation begin once the fighting ends?
These efforts also expose a transatlantic divide. While Washington has sought to revive negotiations and engage with Russia’s security concerns, much of Europe continues to focus on military and financial support for Ukraine. Meanwhile, the human and territorial costs of the war continue to grow, especially for Ukraine, making the search for a negotiated settlement increasingly urgent.
Any peace agreement will have to address territorial and security issues, and territorial compromise may ultimately form part of the price of peace. But ending the war will require more than an agreement over borders. It will also require confronting its human legacy. This raises another fundamental question: how should the human rights violations committed in the course of the conflict be addressed once the fighting has ended?
This is where the proposal developed in this book begins. Are criminal proceedings before national or international courts the only possible response? Or could a mechanism inspired by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) offer an alternative path towards truth, accountability and ultimately reconciliation?
At the heart of this proposal lies the concept of restorative justice. Rather than understanding justice primarily in terms of punishment, restorative justice asks what is needed to address the harm caused by a crime: truth, acknowledgement, responsibility, dialogue and reparation. It seeks, where possible, not merely to punish wrongdoing but to repair damaged human relationships and create the conditions for peaceful coexistence.
The Amnesty Committee of the South African TRC had the power to grant individual criminal and civil amnesty under specific conditions. One essential requirement was full disclosure by the applicant. This mechanism emerged from the political compromise that helped make South Africa’s peaceful transition to democracy and Nelson Mandela’s presidency possible in 1994.
Amnesty was therefore not simply an alternative to punishment; it also became an instrument for uncovering the truth. The prospect of immunity encouraged perpetrators to disclose crimes and secret operations that might otherwise never have come to light. In the case of the Gugulethu Seven, for example, crucial facts about the involvement of a police death squad emerged only through the amnesty proceedings.
The figures also show that amnesty was by no means automatic. Of the 7,116 applications received by the TRC, 5,442 were dismissed because they did not meet the admissibility criteria, in most cases because the offence lacked the required political motive. Only 1,646 applications met the statutory requirements and were examined by the Amnesty Committee. Of these, 998 came from members of the ANC and 293 from members of the South African government’s security forces, including 31 from the South African Defence Force. Ultimately, close to 75 per cent of the eligible applications resulted in amnesty.
The process also helped South Africa confront and, in important respects, rewrite its understanding of its recent history. Public hearings, combined with extensive television and radio coverage, challenged myths propagated during the apartheid era and exposed previously secret operations of the security forces. The TRC thus contributed not only to individual truth-telling, but to the creation of a broader historical record.
At first sight, granting amnesty for serious human rights violations may appear fundamentally unjust. Yet research into the needs of victims has shown that punishment is not necessarily their only, or even their primary, concern. Knowing the truth, receiving acknowledgement of the harm suffered and obtaining reparations may be equally or even more important. Albie Sachs, former Justice of the South African Constitutional Court and himself a victim of the apartheid regime, has described the establishment and implementation of South Africa’s new constitutional order as a profound form of reparation.
This also raises the question of whether international criminal tribunals alone are capable of contributing to lasting peace. As early as 2009, the Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie warned that “the proliferation of international tribunals is a setback to the fundamental idea of peacemaking and the ideals of restorative justice.” In his view, international criminal tribunals risk preventing us from seeing conflicts “in a more comprehensive and politically relevant way.”
This does not mean abandoning criminal justice. Rather, the book argues that truth commissions and criminal courts can complement one another. A truth commission can establish a broader historical record, give victims a voice, uncover evidence and create opportunities for acknowledgement and reparation. During its limited mandate, the Peace Commission should take priority over criminal proceedings. Those who do not apply for amnesty, as well as those whose applications are rejected, would remain subject to criminal prosecution.
Any such process would have to be “colour-blind”: human rights violations would need to be examined according to the same standards, irrespective of who committed them.
Such a body might more appropriately be called a “Peace Commission” rather than a “Truth Commission.” Truth commissions have primarily been established in the aftermath of internal conflicts or authoritarian regimes, whereas the war in Ukraine involves two independent states.
The members of a Peace Commission should include Ukrainian and Russian nationals alongside international experts. Such a composition could help ensure that all sides are heard and that proceedings are conducted as impartially as possible. The Commission itself should be based in a country regarded as sufficiently neutral and acceptable to both sides. Rather than determining that location in advance, Russia and Ukraine should agree on it together. Reaching agreement on the place where the Commission will conduct its work could itself constitute a first, if modest, exercise in cooperation.
The proposal made here is not intended as a ready-made model to be imposed from outside. It is an idea — and a starting point for discussion. Its concrete legal and institutional design would have to be developed primarily by Ukrainian and Russian legal scholars, practitioners and other experts, who understand their respective legal systems, societies and historical experiences and can determine how such a process could be made workable in practice. International experience, including that of South Africa and other truth commissions, may offer ideas and lessons, but it cannot simply be transplanted.
This is particularly important for the restorative dimension of the proposal. The aim should not be for outside experts to arrive with a model of mediation or reconciliation and instruct Ukrainians and Russians how reconciliation is supposed to work. If dialogue, restorative processes or, ultimately, reconciliation are to have meaning, they must grow out of the societies concerned and be shaped by the people who will have to live with their consequences. International experts can support such a process, share experience and help create conditions in which it can take place — but they should not own it.
To establish the truth credibly, the Commission would also require meaningful investigative powers. It should be able to summon and question witnesses, including senior political and military figures, and to obtain documents and other evidence necessary to clarify both individual and institutional responsibility.
Crucial to the establishment of such a Peace Commission would be the authority to grant individual amnesties under clearly defined conditions. Victims should be given the opportunity to tell their stories publicly and in a dignified setting, accompanied and supported by psychologists where necessary.
The experiences of other truth commissions also offer important lessons for the design of such a process. Canada is particularly instructive. Its Truth and Reconciliation Commission gave Indigenous survivors of the residential school system an opportunity to speak publicly about abuse and the loss of language, culture and identity. Yet testimony about experiences dating back decades could reopen wounds that had never fully healed. Although a 24-hour support hotline was established for survivors, some felt that this was not sufficient. The Canadian experience therefore illustrates that truth-telling, however important for acknowledgement and reconciliation, must be accompanied by sustained and readily accessible psychological support.
This is particularly relevant where testimony concerns sexual violence. The experience of earlier truth commissions shows that the specific suffering of women can easily remain obscured unless a conscious gender perspective is built into the process from the outset. South Africa’s TRC itself later acknowledged that its definition of gross human rights violations had resulted in insufficient attention being paid to forms of abuse predominantly experienced by women. Sierra Leone went further: special hearings on sexual violence were conducted with particular safeguards, women could choose whether to testify publicly, behind a screen or in closed proceedings, and questioning was conducted by female commissioners.
A future Peace Commission should build on these experiences. Victims of sexual violence – women, men and children – should be offered specific protection, and those conducting the interviews should be trained in trauma-sensitive questioning. A sufficient number of female statement takers should be available, and victims should be able to decide under what conditions they wish to testify. The Commission should also investigate whether sexual violence consisted of isolated offences or formed part of a broader military strategy, including the role of commanders and command structures. Its task should therefore go beyond documenting individual acts: it should make gender-specific patterns of violence visible and formulate recommendations capable of addressing structural violence against women after the conflict.
Protection should not, however, stop with the victims. One aspect that has received remarkably little attention in previous truth commissions is the risk of secondary traumatization among those who listen to, translate and process thousands of accounts of torture, killing and sexual violence. My proposal therefore includes psychological support not only for victims but also for statement takers, data-processing staff and, importantly, interpreters and translators. Experience from the South African TRC showed that staff members could absorb the suffering they encountered to such an extent that they themselves developed symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Regular psychological supervision or mediated support meetings should therefore form an integral part of the institutional design of a future Peace Commission.
Canada also offers a broader lesson about what must happen after a truth commission has completed its work. Truth-telling and acknowledgement are not sufficient if recommendations remain largely on paper. The implementation of recommendations – including reparations and institutional reform – should therefore not depend solely on the political willingness of governments years later.
Victims should also receive prompt compensation through a People’s Fund, established specifically for this purpose and institutionally independent of the Commission. Those who have benefited economically from the war, as well as those who will benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine, could be called upon to contribute to this fund.
In addition, those who are granted amnesty should be required to make a contribution towards repairing the harm they have caused, either by paying compensation directly to the victims or, where they lack the financial means to do so, by making a symbolic act of reparation. This could help avoid the impression that someone who has committed serious human rights violations can get off “cheaply” through an amnesty while the victims are left empty-handed.
Public access and media coverage should also form an integral part of the Commission’s work. In South Africa, victims’ and amnesty hearings were generally held in public, with the most important developments reported daily on television and radio.
The worldwide broadcasting of the Eichmann trial in 1961 likewise illustrates how public testimony can contribute to a society’s collective confrontation with past atrocities; the Israeli historian Tom Segev has even described the trial as having had a therapeutic effect on Israeli society.
A future Peace Commission should therefore ensure broad media access to its hearings, allowing people in Ukraine, Russia and beyond to hear victims’ accounts and learn as directly as possible what happened.
Outlook
Desmond Tutu, Chair of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, described the central concern in dealing with systemic injustice as “not retribution or punishment but, in the spirit of Ubuntu, the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships.”¹
This insight may be particularly important after an armed conflict. If the objective is not merely to end a war but to make long-term peaceful coexistence possible, accountability must ultimately be accompanied by truth, acknowledgement, reparation and reconciliation.
Such a process need not necessarily wait until a comprehensive Peace Commission can be established. In 2025, I proposed a more limited Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the Donbass, focusing on serious human rights violations committed there between 2014 and February 2022. Its purpose would be to establish the facts independently, give the affected civilian population a voice, acknowledge the suffering endured and contribute to reconciliation. International participation could help strengthen its independence and credibility.
A Donbass commission could thus serve as a first step – and perhaps as a testing ground for a broader Peace Commission after the end of the war. An impartial examination of this particularly contested chapter of the conflict could help create something that will ultimately be indispensable for lasting peace: a space in which competing narratives can be confronted with facts, suffering can be acknowledged regardless of the identity of the victim or perpetrator, and responsibility can be recognised without perpetuating the cycle of retaliation.
