Feedback
Anti-Discrimination Centre “Memorial” continues to highlight the challenges faced by Roma communities in Ukraine. This year, with the support of IPHR was orgnised a meeting with Roma veterans who voluntarily joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The event was organized in partnership with the Ukrainian Centre of Romani Studies at Kherson State University.
The idea of the event was to bring to the EU capital the voices of Roma from Ukraine, who share the hardships of war alongside other Ukrainians—many of them have chosen to defend their country on the battlefields. The speakers were Arsen Mednik and Oleksii Panchenko, veterans of the Armed Forces of Ukraine of Roma origin, as well as Yanush Panchenko, an expert, researcher, and co-founder of the Ukrainian Centre of Romani Studies at KSU. Yanush was forced to flee the temporarily occupied territory of Kherson region and continues his human rights work in exile.
The event included a screening of a fragment from a documentary film about Arsen Mednik.
This conversation followed a series of publications and studies published earlier by ADC “Memorial” and dedicated to the situation of Roma in Ukraine throughout different stages of the ongoing war caused by Russian aggression, such as the animated documentary “Chavoreskero Drom Mariupolestyr” / “Travel of a Roma boy from Mariupol”, about a Roma child who fled from Mariupol, as well as human rights reports such as “Roma from Ukraine: A Year of War and Flight” (2023), “Romani Voices from Hell” (2022), the photo report “For Today, They Don’t Seem to Be Shooting…” (2016–2017), and the early report “Roma and War” (2015).