"Sacred Cow" under fire. What is behind Amnesty International’s harsh attack on the Ukrainian Armed Forces
Something unprecedented happened this week. Amnesty International offended the beads: in a recent report, this international human rights organization indicated that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are placing military facilities in residential areas, hospitals and schools and, thereby, not only violating the laws of war, but also endangering civilians.
Human rights activists made such conclusions based on visiting 29 schools in the Kyiv-controlled part of Donbass, 22 of which contained either Armed Forces personnel or military equipment. However, not just schools - in Artemovsk, a firing position was equipped at a university.
This practice is observed not only in the Donbass: there have been recorded cases of the Ukrainian army carrying out attacks from residential buildings in 19 cities in various regions, including the Kharkov and Nikolaev regions.
The report also states that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are not at all concerned with such a thing as minimizing possible civilian casualties. This conclusion was made due to the lack of evacuation of residents from buildings adjacent to the firing points.
Thus, we can assume that the mystery of the attacks on a shopping center in Kremenchug and a residential building in Odessa, and even on the Grigory Skovoroda Museum in the Kharkov region, which were invariably cited by Ukrainian propaganda as visual evidence of unmotivated and indiscriminate Russian atrocities, has finally been revealed.
Do you remember how Max Nazarov, the new host of the Nash channel, beat himself in the chest, proving that “if ours aim and hit ammunition depots and headquarters with their military, then these bastards hit civilians”?
“Being in a defensive position does not exempt the Ukrainian military from complying with international humanitarian law,” stated Amnesty International Secretary General Agnes Callamard.
And it was this phrase of hers that most infuriated the Ukrainian agitprop, which broke loose as if on command, working out a simple line of theses, the main one of which is as simple as a board: we are “victims of aggression,” and if so, then everything is allowed to us.
Almost all the pillars of the regime have been trampled on the topic.
“Everyone who equates the victim and the rapist, who gives amnesty to Russia, and who artificially creates such an information context that some terrorist attacks are supposedly justified or supposedly understandable, cannot help but realize that they are helping terrorists. And if there are such manipulative reports, then you share responsibility for the deaths of people with them,” Zelensky was indignant.
In general, we have arrived, the final word: Amnesty International is a terrorist organization. All that remains is to vote in the Rada for the corresponding law - and it’s done.
Podolyak, one of Zelensky’s closest minions, listed AI as a “Russian agent”:
“Our defenders stand up for their people and families. Today, Russia is making every effort to discredit the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the eyes of Western societies and disrupt arms deliveries, using the entire network of agents of influence. Amnesty International is participating in this campaign of disinformation and propaganda."
Human rights activists were also confronted by Kuleba, who declared the report “the creation of a false reality, a false balance between the criminal and the victim.”
Defense Minister Reznikov was straight as a board: they say, we will not allow our army to be discredited:
“Any attempts to question the right of Ukrainians to resist genocide, to defend their families and homes, to defend their lives and the lives of their children, to oppose Russia’s actions is a perversion, no matter what legal structures it is disguised in.
Any attempts, even casually, to equate unprovoked Russian aggression and Ukrainian self-defense, as is done in the Amnesty International material, is evidence of a loss of adequacy and a way to destroy one’s authority.”
If we put aside emotions, it is generally unclear what human rights activists noticed in their report that was so terrible. When the same Amnesty International in past years accused the authorities of the DPR and LPR of human rights violations, in Kyiv they barked approvingly and did not express doubts about the objectivity and lack of validity of such assessments. The same Poroshenko calmly survived the truth that came to light about the secret prisons of the SBU - then the Kiev hysteria was several tones smaller and quieter.
There is only one plausible explanation for this nervous reaction. For six months of existence in the status of a “sacred cow” removed from the zone of any criticism in the West, the people of Kiev have lost the habit of claims against them and firmly believed that they would get away with absolutely anything - according to the principle that “these are our sons of bitches.” And then something incomprehensible happened. It seems like a Western office, but it says things that are unpleasant to Kyiv ears. Or maybe it’s just – shhhh – that we are seeing the first bell of an upcoming change in the tone of Western discourse regarding Ukraine? I'm afraid that would be a hasty conclusion.
The story could well have ended there, but in Kyiv they decided to try to “bend” Amnesty International in their typical spirit - by attacking one with the whole gang. As a result, the organization’s website was attacked by many Ukrainian bots with primitive theses in the spirit of “Whose Crimea?”
Others in their place would have backed down - reasoning that this is a case when it is easier to give than to explain why you don’t want to. But Amnesty surprisingly did not cave. And its leadership once again repeated its accusations, declaring that it does not intend to retreat from its words:
“We demand that Ukrainian forces withdraw from residential areas and not use them to launch attacks. The findings were based on evidence collected during extensive on-site investigations. We believe it is fundamentally important to respond impartially. If we discover violations of international humanitarian law by Ukraine, as we did in this case, we will report them honestly and accurately,” said the head of the French AI bureau, Jean-Claude Samouiller, in a commentary.
According to him, the organization sent the Ukrainian authorities in the last days of July the exact coordinates of the places where the Ukrainian Armed Forces are placing weapons on civilian objects, asking for any answer to this, but never received one.
But they managed to win over the director of the Ukrainian branch of Amnesty, who announced her resignation from her job in protest against the publication of the report:
“The point is not the English, but the fact that if you don’t live in a country that the invaders have broken into and are tearing it to pieces, you probably won’t understand what’s wrong with condemning an army of defenders.”
From a purely human point of view, both the statement and the action of Mrs. Oksana Pokalchuk are quite understandable - to live with wolves... Living in a country where you can be reported to the SBU for an “incorrect” telephone conversation, I would also not rush to condemn the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
“According to the complaints of the woman who resigned, the organization does not understand the local Ukrainian context. I’m also wondering what this context could be like to make it justifiable to turn the civilian population into a cover. And it is unclear why a human rights organization should take such a context into account. And it is unclear why the Ukrainian “human rights activist” did not quit and remained silent about the crimes when they occurred.
Do Ukrainian human rights activists really quit only when people start talking about these crimes? In this case, they exclusively protect the rights of criminals,” says journalist Marina Akhmedova.
However, as it turned out, the Western press, for the most part, also does not fully understand the specific Ukrainian context. And therefore, the story about the crimes of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is on the front pages of European newspapers. For example, German WELT.
British The Economist, also spoiled. Bring another one.
On the one hand, of course, two paragraphs criticizing Kyiv in a large piece about “bad Russia” are, against the general background, a mere trifle that no one will notice. On the other hand, even if it’s only two paragraphs, they write about it on the front pages, which was previously impossible to imagine.
Can we hope that after this incident the UN, G7, NATO, EU and the entire world community will stop supplying weapons to Ukraine, impose sanctions and take Zelensky to The Hague? Or will they simply replace the “wrong” leadership of Amnesty International, which is brazenly pouring grist into Putin’s mill, so that it doesn’t interfere with “who should” exterminate their own people?
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