A Harriman alumnus dedicates his life to illuminating the consequences of armed conflict
Ole Solvang (M.I.A. ’05) moved to Kyiv in July 2023 to work for the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU). As one of the mission’s deputies, he oversees the work of three UN field offices—Dnipro, Kharkiv, and Odesa—and a satellite office in Chisinau, Moldova. The teams in each office conduct fact-finding missions, interviewing victims and witnesses of human rights violations and documenting the number of civilian injuries and casualties. “Sometimes these missions take place close to the frontlines,” Solvang said during a phone interview in September. “We have to be careful.”
Solvang’s job involves supporting the teams—“helping them set priorities, plan missions, figure out what to do”—and analyzing the information they collect. The mission then presents its findings and recommendations in reports to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. He goes out on some of the fact-finding missions, too. It’s familiar work for Solvang, who has spent much of his career documenting the consequences of armed conflict. He began as a consultant, researcher, and later deputy director of emergency response for Human Rights Watch from 2008 to 2017. There he documented Russia’s war in Georgia in 2008, the 2010 revolution in Kyrgyzstan that ousted President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, Russia’s initial invasion of Eastern Ukraine in 2014, and the wars in Yemen and Syria, among others.
Solvang, who is Norwegian, became interested in armed conflict prevention while serving in the Norwegian army. While in college, he took a year-long break to work as a Human Rights Watch associate in Tashkent. “We were documenting the terrible human rights situation in Uzbekistan and it was absolutely clear to me that unless that improved, it would lead to massive violence, which it did just a few years later,” said Solvang.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Solvang was the partnerships and policy director at the Norwegian Refugee Council. With the war flaring up again in Ukraine, he changed his path. “I wanted to go back to investigations, to be part of the effort to document violations and hold perpetrators to account.” He quit his job in Norway and started working for the Vienna-based UN Commission of Inquiry, where he led investigations into war crimes and human rights violations, traveling to Ukraine frequently on fact-finding missions. Then, in the summer of 2023, he moved to Ukraine full-time to run the UN’s Human Rights Monitoring Commission field offices.
The UN HRMMU is one of the few organizations with a mandate and capacity to monitor and document abuses in the Russian-occupied territory of Ukraine. “One of the things that really struck me . . . has been the extent of the use of torture in occupied territory against civilians, but also against Ukrainian prisoners of war,” Solvang said.
But as the third year of the war draws to a close, global attention to Ukraine has waned. “We’re trying to really keep a focus on the impact on civilians of this war,” said Solvang. “That does get reported in the media, but it’s also something that tends to disappear a bit when other things compete for attention.” ◆
Featured photo: Ole Solvang at the Kyiv School of Economics speaking about the civilian impact of attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Photograph courtesy of the Kyiv School of Economics
