Hello and welcome to the Wednesday edition of the Battleground Ukraine podcast with me, Saul David.

Today on the big interview, we welcome Dr. Eva Vukasic, an assistant professor

in international history at Utrecht University and an expert on irregular armed groups,

genocide, mass violence and accountability for war crimes.

Iba, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for inviting me.

Now, before we talk about the current conflict in Ukraine, which after all is the main subject

of our podcast, or at least at the moment, tell me about your experience working for the

Special Department for War Crimes in Sarajevo and why you believe that criminal

accountability is so important. Right. So some 15 years ago or so, I worked as a researcher

and analyst. So I'm a historian. I'm not a lawyer. And sometimes people are surprised to hear,

oh, what does a historian do in war crimes trials? Actually quite a bit. So I worked with

prosecutors and investigators and, of course, other staff to bring cases of war crimes, crimes

against humanity and genocide to court. These are cases, of course, coming from the war in Bosnia

and Herzegovina, which took place between 1992 and 1995. So this is one of the wars that was

sort of happening in the former

Yugoslavia as it was falling apart. So I was also a part of a project to assess what the

workload was. So this is kind of mid-2000s, 10 years after the war has ended. Similarly to Ukraine,

the country is, it's just submerged in allegations of war crimes.

There's many open case files.

There are many investigations that should take place.

So I was part of this effort to try to figure out what do we have on our hands as institutions

...