A Confession about Ordinary People. Oleksandra Romantsova Featured at the Rimini Meeting 2025
On 22 August, Oleksandra Romantsova, Executive Director of the Centre for Civil Liberties, attended the opening of the exhibition “In abandoned places we will build anew with new bricks” in Rimini, Italy. There, the human rights activist engaged with visitors, answering their questions, as she herself was a subject of the exhibition.
The Rimini Meeting is the world’s largest forum of Catholic communities, attracting not only participants from across Italy but also from many other countries. Activists, human rights advocates, members of civic organisations and simply those connected to Catholic initiatives in one way or another gather there. The event is vast in scale, comprising discussions, meetings, lectures, exhibitions and more, with some 5 000 volunteers involved in its organisation.
One of the most significant elements of this year’s forum was an exhibition about the war in Ukraine and its impact on ordinary people. It was organised by Italian Catholic groups with long-standing ties to Ukraine and a history of opposing regimes such as Putin’s, dating back to Soviet times. The curators sought to give the Italian community a glimpse into the realities of the Russian–Ukrainian war and to present an unvarnished picture of it. Special guides led tours in both Ukrainian and Italian. Among the exhibits was, for example, a door from a cellar in the village of Yahidne in the Chernihiv region, where people once hid from shelling, where they died, and where new Ukrainians were born. The exhibition aimed to communicate through such personal stories and lived experiences.
Some of the people featured in the exhibition came to the opening to share their testimonies and answer visitors’ questions. One of them was Oleksandra Romantsova. During informal gatherings, participants and speakers engaged in a “peer-to-peer” format of dialogue. For example, alongside Ms Romantsova, the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, also spoke with guests.
“I spoke about human rights abuses, about the victims of war crimes we are documenting, about the suffering caused by Russian aggression and how it affects the everyday lives of ordinary Ukrainian women and men, children and adults. It was important, from our perspective as human rights defenders, to explain what occupation really means: how social ties are torn apart, how families are broken by war. On this occasion I did not use legal language or an official speech style. On the contrary, it was a confession about ordinary people – people who never chose to live under such conditions. People who did not wish to die, to risk their lives at the front, to lose their loved ones, to feel guilty for not serving, to flee from their homes,” said Oleksandra Romantsova.
