Amnesty International report: Aidar and the Ukrainian army committed war crimes
Kyiv, September 09 (PolitNavigator, Yuriy Kovalchuk) - The human rights organization Amnesty International published a report on the observance of human rights in the military conflict zone in Donbass - the document also includes violations on the Ukrainian side.
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Members of the organization talked with eyewitnesses from Alchevsk, Donetsk, Kramatorsk, Krasny Luch, Lisichansk, Lugansk, Rubezhny, Pervomaisk and Slavyansk. The researchers also interviewed Ukrainian refugees in the Rostov region of Russia.
As a result, Amnesty International was able to find out that Ukrainian government forces subjected these settlements to intense shelling. The Ukrainian military fired indiscriminately at residential areas, which is a war crime.
The organization also found out that members of the Aidar volunteer battalion were involved in massive violations of human rights. This includes kidnapping, illegal detention, ill-treatment, theft, extortion, and possibly execution.
Typically, Aidar fighters kidnapped local men, mostly businessmen or farmers, whom they accused of collaborating with the separatists and kept in makeshift detention centers. In almost all cases, the victims were beaten at the time of capture and/or during interrogation. As a rule, relatives of the victims or they themselves had to pay a ransom for release. All detainees were confiscated of valuable property, including money, cars, phones, bank cards, etc.
Many of the witnesses and victims were reluctant to share details of the incidents, fearing retaliation from members of the Aidar battalion.
According to Amnesty International, in Severodonetsk alone, 38 criminal cases were opened in connection with actions committed by members of the Aidar battalion. It's basically robbery. Local police told Amnesty International that they were well aware of the criminal activities of the Aydarites, but were unable to do anything other than register criminal cases.
For example, on August 23, a security guard in Oleksandrovka, Luhansk region, was captured by several dozen armed men who arrived in vehicles flying Ukrainian flags. At least one of the attackers was identified as a member of the Aidar battalion. According to eyewitnesses, the kidnappers accused the guard of collaborating with the separatists, beat him with rifle butts and took him away in an unknown direction. Only on August 27, the victim’s family learned that he was in the SBU department in a neighboring city.
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