Head of Amnesty International Ukraine Oksana Pokalchuk wrote that the Amnesty International report published on 4 August, alleging the Ukrainian Army endangers civilians when defending against Russian aggression, was prepared contrary to the recommendations of the local team. They will not translate it into Ukrainian or publish it on the Amnesty Ukraine website and will work to offset the damage that it does. The local team continues working on documenting Russian war crimes. Here is a translation of the post:
“Today, the English-language website of Amnesty International published material criticizing the actions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. It was created on the basis of data collected by foreign researchers of the Crisis Response Department of the global office of our organization.
The Ukrainian office was not involved in the preparation or writing of the text of the publication. And, unfortunately, already at the initial stage of the development of this report, we reached a dead end, where the arguments of our team regarding the inadmissibility and incompleteness of such material were not taken into account.
Ukrainian officials slam Amnesty’s International accusations of Ukrainian Army
For their part, representatives of the Ukrainian office did everything they could to prevent this material from being made public. When our repeated objections were answered with a firm no, we also did everything we could to minimize the distribution of the material. We asked the authors to send us all versions of the material in advance (unfortunately, this did not happen), we convinced them to ask for an official comment from the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, but at the same time, unfortunately, they did not give us enough time to receive an answer and published the report without their comment. We also categorically refuse to publish this press release on our website or to translate it into Ukrainian, due to its, in our opinion, one-sidedness. We are very sorry that even after all possible arguments “against” we were still not heard.
Everyone from the Ukrainian office of Amnesty knows that Russia is responsible for the crimes of aggression against Ukraine. Moreover, a significant part of our team are people who were personally forced to save themselves and their loved ones from the war with Russia, leaving everything behind. Some of us have already become displaced persons or refugees twice.
Since February 24, my Ukrainian colleagues and I have been working non-stop to ensure that all war crimes are verified and recorded for the international community. We have released more than two dozen materials about crimes committed by the Russian Federation on the territory of Ukraine. Many materials had an international resonance and will be repeatedly used in international institutions in the process of restoring justice.
But you are right, bureaucracy, misunderstanding of the local context, inflexible work system, ignoring the opinion of the Ukrainian team and the position of the human rights community in Ukraine – all this prevented us from stopping today’s release at the idea stage, as it should be. Nevertheless, we fought all the mentioned phenomena to the last. And we will continue to fight in the future in different forms and in different positions, no matter what it costs us.
I and the team of the Ukrainian office believe in human rights, we believe in the victory of Ukraine, we believe that all those guilty of war crimes should be brought to justice.
Amnesty International team in Ukraine”
