The President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyi, said that Amnesty International’s latest report on the war in Ukraine is an attempt “to amnesty the terrorist state and shift responsibility from the aggressor to the victim.”
“Regarding the crimes of Russian terrorists, we do not see clear and timely reports from some international organizations. Today we saw a completely different report from Amnesty International, which, unfortunately, tries to amnesty the terrorist state and shift the responsibility from the aggressor to the victim. There is not and cannot be, even hypothetically, any condition under which any Russian strikes become justified. Aggression against our state is unprovoked, invasive and frankly terroristic. And if someone makes a report in which the victim and the aggressor are allegedly the same in some respects, if some data about the victims is analyzed, and what the aggressor was doing at that time is ignored, then this cannot be tolerated,” Zelensky said in an evening video message.
The president added: “Everyone who amnesties Russia and who artificially creates such an informational context that some attacks by terrorists are supposedly justified or supposedly understandable, cannot fail to realize that this is helping terrorists. And if these are manipulative reports, then you share the responsibility for the death of people with them.”
Meanwhile, Amnesty International Secretary General Agnes Kalamar tweeted: “Ukrainian and Russian trolls on social media: all of them are attacking Amnesty International’s investigation today. This is called war propaganda and disinformation. It will not weaken our impartiality or change the facts.”
Earlier, the Ukrainian office of Amnesty International stated that “reports” of this nature are the work of a separate team – the Crisis Response Department.
Previously, the international human rights organization Amnesty International in the new reports said that the Ukrainian military is putting civilians at risk by setting up bases and deploying weapons in residential areas, including schools and hospitals, while defending against a full-scale Russian invasion.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba called Amnesty International’s statement unfair: “This behavior of Amnesty International is not about finding and conveying the truth to the world, it is about creating a false balance between the criminal and the victim, between the country that destroys the civilian population and entire cities by the thousands, and the country , which is desperately defending itself, saving its people and the entire continent from this influx.”
Kuleba urged not to engage in “creating a false reality where everyone is a little guilty of something.”
At the same time, the adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, Mykhailo Podolyak, said that Amnesty International is participating in the Russian disinformation and propaganda campaign to discredit the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
The study indicated that placing weapons in residential areas violates international humanitarian law, as it turns civilian objects into military targets. As a result of Russian strikes on populated areas, civilians are killed and civil infrastructure is destroyed, human rights defenders note.
Human rights activists claim that the armed forces were based in residential buildings in 19 towns and villages in the Kharkiv, Donetsk and Mykolaiv regions. Most of the residential areas where the soldiers were stationed were several kilometers from the front line.
“Being in a defensive position does not exempt the Ukrainian military from compliance with international humanitarian law,” said Amnesty International Secretary General Agniesz Callamar. – The Ukrainian government should immediately ensure the placement of its forces away from populated areas or evacuate the civilian population from the areas where the military operates.”
Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, emphasized that “the only thing that poses a threat to the lives of Ukrainians is the army of Russian executioners and rapists who came to Ukraine to commit genocide.”
At the same time, Amnesty International points out that Russia carries out indiscriminate attacks, in particular with the use of ammunition prohibited by the international community. The organization recorded that Russia committed war crimes in Kharkiv. “Amnesty found no evidence that Ukrainian forces were in civilian areas that were illegally attacked by the Russian military,” the report says.
The Ministry of Defense said that Ukraine is open to investigations into compliance with the laws and customs of war, but international organizations should first of all demand a halt to Russia’s armed aggression. Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov stated that “any attempt to even casually equate unprovoked Russian aggression with Ukrainian self-defense, as done in the Amnesty International material, is evidence of a loss of adequacy and a way to destroy one’s authority.”
Dmytro Lubinets, the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights, also called the Amnesty International report manipulative and giving more priority to the actions of the aggressor country.
Last month, another human rights organization Human Rights Watch stated that Russian and Ukrainian forces are putting civilians in Ukraine at unnecessary risk by deploying their forces in populated areas and not moving residents to safer areas.
