When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Mykhailo Puryshev lived in the eastern city of Mariupol. He was a business owner who operated a restaurant and nightclub called Evo. It sat next to the campus of Pryazovskyi State Technical University, whose students it served.

On March 9, an aerial Russian attack on their neighborhood forced Puryshev and the students to run for their lives. He filmed as they rushed into a university building, later posting the video on TikTok. The video is mostly dark, but the audio captures the sounds of nearby explosions, adults screaming, children crying, and an atmosphere of chaos and terror.

According to Human Rights Watch, the attack that day killed at least two and injured one. It also did significant damage to the university’s buildings, forcing it and its students — Puryshev’s customer base — to relocate 150 miles away, in Dnipro.

Evo became a shelter as the attack on the city intensified. Puryshev spent the next three weeks evacuating approximately 200 people from the basement of his former business during six harrowing trips. He left the city for the last time in late March.

In May, after a three-month siege, the city fell into Russian hands, becoming a symbol of both the war’s horrors and Ukrainian resistance. In a video Puryshev posted on TikTok in late January 2024, he expressed a simple wish: “I want to go home.”

Military campaigns will in all likelihood determine whether he ever can. An eventual Ukrainian recapture of his city will not, however, restore what Puryshev and people throughout Ukraine have lost because of Russia’s war. Retaking territory will not compensate for homes fled or businesses and communities destroyed, to say nothing of people injured and killed by the fighting.

Richmond Law professor Chiara Giorgetti has emerged as a leader of international efforts to address some aspects of their loss. In her scholarship and through active roles with international organizations, she is advancing concrete efforts to hold aggressors financially accountable and provide compensation to the war’s victims.

“When Russia invaded Ukraine, it was such a flagrant violation of international law that a lot of international lawyers said, ‘Well, what can we do? What are the instruments that exist?’” she said. “We quickly thought that we had to make sure that people who were injured because of the invasion received some kind of compensation.”

In December 2023, Giorgetti flew to The Hague in the Netherlands to begin one of her most prominent roles in the effort. She is vice chair of the Register of Damage for Ukraine, a seven-member board for a body created within the framework of the Council of Europe. The board’s job is to set the register’s rules and procedures and begin preserving evidence for the eventual adjudication of claims against Russia.

“It is incredibly stimulating and at the same time very humbling,” she said. “My colleagues are incredible international lawyers, and we are creating something new.”

Something new, indeed. The register is the most recent iteration of a little-known international legal instrument that Giorgetti has both studied and practiced in throughout her career: an international claims commission, or ICC. These ad hoc bodies settle monetary claims for harm, a sort of civil litigation counterpart to criminal proceedings that happen at places such as the International Criminal Court or the European Court of Human Rights.

Unlike standing courts of international justice, each ICC is a unique instrument tailored to specific circumstances and challenges. Their modern origin point is the 1794 treaty between Great Britain and the newly independent United States negotiated by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay. Jay’s Treaty, as it is known, created three claims commissions to adjudicate border disputes, resolve unpaid debts owed to British merchants, and settle various maritime claims. The model succeeded well enough that ICCs continued to be created and adapted throughout the 19th and 20th centuries — for example, suppressing the transatlantic slave trade, resolving a naval blockade of Venezuela’s ports, and imposing reparations on Germany after World War I, among other purposes.

Over the last 50 years, ICCs have continued to be created consensually by treaty or imposed upon aggressors by the international community. In 1981, Iran and the U.S. agreed to create a claims commission to settle disputes arising from the 1979 takeover of the American embassy in Tehran. In 1991, the UN Security Council imposed the United Nations Claims Commission on Iraq in response to its unlawful invasion and occupation of Kuwait. Over the course of the UNCC’s 30-year run, the Iraqi oil revenue was used to pay out more than $52 billion in compensation awarded to more than 1.5 million claimants.

Giorgetti was professionally involved with the UNCC as a senior associate with a firm representing the government of Iraq. She also represented Eritrea during its participation in the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission, which was set up in 2000 after armed conflict between the nations.

“Each claims commission is different,” she said. “The UNCC and Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission were similar, but they were not the same. The UNCC had many more claimants, many more states, and had a lot of money. The Eritrea-Ethiopia one was very small; one of its main questions was where to find the money for compensation.”

This professional experience and her extensive scholarship make Giorgetti one of the world’s leading experts on the evolution of claims commissions. Her background made her a natural choice when the government of Ukraine reached out to international lawyers for guidance on how it might secure reparations from Russia. In May 2022, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, appointed her to a working group formally advising the government on reparations options. The working group’s efforts laid the groundwork for the passage of a 2022 UN General Assembly resolution holding Russia accountable for violations of international law in Ukraine and recognizing the need for a mechanism for reparations.

This step was important for establishing the legitimacy of efforts to hold Russia legally accountable, but it also pointed to a major hurdle for any claims commission focused on Ukraine: Russia’s status as a veto-holding, permanent member of the UN Security Council. The Security Council had been the binding authority for forcing Iraqi participation in the UNCC, but Russia’s veto power prevents any such coercion in this case. Likewise, a treaty agreement such as the one between the U.S. and Iran in 1981 seems highly improbable, barring some dramatic battlefield development or change in Russian leadership. That’s why the Council of Europe’s action to create the Register of Damage for Ukraine — the body on whose board Giorgetti sits — was so important. It picked up the General Assembly’s call for the creation of a mechanism for reparations for Ukraine.

“The international community must ensure the mechanism works,” she said. “It’s very important that even veto-holding countries like Russia can be held accountable. Having the veto power doesn’t mean that you’re immune from that. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s a system that shows there are instruments that exist and could work.”

An aspect of the Ukraine claims commission that makes it unique is the fact that as it undertakes its work, the war continues to progress, and the harms multiply.

“This is the very first time,” Giorgetti said. “In the past, the event that caused the creation of the commission had terminated, but here the aggression is continuing, so we will continue to look at injuries that are occurring. In terms of collection of evidence, it’s very important to act now so that we can maintain the evidence we have.”

The board’s initial tasks are creating rules and procedures for the Ukraine Register. It will also define legitimate claim categories and claimants so that the register can begin to gather and preserve evidence for later claims adjudication. There remain many outstanding issues to solve, not the least of which is where funds for providing compensation will come from. One possible solution is seizing Russian assets that are currently frozen in Western financial institutions. Legal scholars are divided on the legitimacy of doing so, and politicians and economists are weighing the potential long-term implications.

Questions such as that are beyond the current scope of the Ukraine Register, which is focused on registering eligible claims and laying the groundwork for later claims adjudication and compensation. Giorgetti and other board members draft and review documents and meet virtually as necessary. Four times a year, the board meets in person, which means that she is intermittently flying from her classes at Richmond Law to the Hague.

These dual roles of professor and practitioner are important for her as a researcher and for her students, she said. Her professional trajectory provides a good example of why. One of her early career opportunities came about when she was a research fellow at New York University and met a professor who was also actively working on cases. One of the cases required help from someone with legal skills who could read documents in Italian, Giorgetti’s first language. Giorgetti progressed from that work to a position with the UN, putting her on the path to where she is today.

“I always try to have a little step into practice — and maybe now I have more than a toe in, maybe half my leg,” she said. “As an international lawyer, I think you have to practice. It’s fundamental to grow as an academic and be able to teach.”

Her connections and practice offer phenomenal experiences for her students. During recent practicum courses focused on international law, her students worked with the codification division of the United Nations and with the International Court of Justice on projects related to the use of expert witnesses and questions such as whether social media posts by leaders are binding expressions of state positions.

Those projects introduced students not only to technical legal questions, but also to a sense of how much global impact international law practice can have. “I like the fact that this work is consequential,” she said. “It looks at core questions that I see as fundamental in our lives.” This impact, ultimately, is what drew Giorgetti to the field — the chance that she can help people like Puryshev recover some of what violations of international law have cost them.