The director of the Ukrainian office of the human rights organization Amnesty International (AI), Oksana Pokalchuk, announced her resignation the day after the publication of the AI ​​report, in which human rights activists accuse Ukraine of violating humanitarian law and the rules of war. Pokalchuk wrote about her decision on her Facebook page on Friday, August 5th.

“It hurts to admit, but Amnesty International’s leadership and I disagree on values. That’s why I’ve decided to leave the organization. I believe that any work for the benefit of society should be done taking into account the local context and thinking through the consequences,” she explained. such a move.

“Everything has been crushed against a wall of bureaucracy and a dead language barrier. Unless you live in a country that has been invaded by invaders and is being torn apart, you probably don’t understand what it’s like to condemn an ​​army of And there are no words in any language, able to convey this to someone who has not experienced this pain,” Pokalchuk wrote.

The Ukrainian office of AI tried to convey its position to the organization

Pokalchuk admitted that until the last moment he had hoped that the organization’s Ukrainian office would be able to convey his opinion to Amnesty. “Until yesterday I had a naive hope that I could fix everything. And this text will be deleted and replaced with another one. Today I realized that this will not happen,” she wrote.

“In recent days”, the Ukrainian office, according to her, “has actively carried out explanatory work within the organization”. “I spoke to Amnesty representatives from dozens of countries around the world so that the position of Ukraine and Ukrainians would be heard. the people for whom the organization works”, emphasized Pokalchuk.

In her appeal, the human rights activist said that the organization in the report had to provide the opinion of both sides and take into account the position of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry. “As we noted, Amnesty International representatives eventually approached the Ministry of Defense with a request for a response, but they gave very little time for a response,” she said. The resulting report, she said, “sounded like support for Russian narratives” and “became a tool of Russian propaganda.”

Amnesty International’s Resonance Report

Amnesty International published a report on 4 August entitled “Ukrainian war tactics endanger civilians”. In it, human rights activists claimed that units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine repeatedly deployed their equipment and fired from positions in residential areas, on the territory of schools and hospitals, putting the civilian population at risk.

“Ukraine’s tactics violated international humanitarian law by turning civilian targets into military targets. As a result of Russian attacks on populated areas, civilians were killed and civilian infrastructure was destroyed,” the organization said after trips to the sites of the attacks and anonymous interviews. . with local residents. In general, human rights activists recorded such battle tactics in 19 settlements in the Kharkiv, Donetsk and Nikolaev regions. The organization did not publish photos or videos of the trip.

“We document how Ukrainian forces put civilians at risk and violate the laws of war when operating in populated areas. Being on the defensive does not exempt the Ukrainian military from complying with international humanitarian law,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary general. International.

Kyiv criticized the report by human rights activists

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, commenting on the report, said Amnesty International “is trying to amnesty the terrorist state and shift responsibility from the perpetrator to the victim”. “There is not and hypothetically cannot be a single condition under which any Russian attack on Ukraine is justified. <...> If someone makes a report where the victim and the abuser are supposed to be the same in some way, if some data about the victim is analyzed and what the abuser was doing at that time is ignored, that cannot be tolerated,” he said. Zelensky. .

“The report distorts reality, draws a false moral equality between perpetrator and victim and contributes to Russia’s disinformation efforts,” wrote Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba.

The adviser to the Chief of Staff of the President of Ukraine, Mykhailo Podolyak, accused international human rights activists of participating in a campaign to discredit Ukraine’s armed forces, organized by Russia, to prevent the supply of weapons. “The only thing that poses a threat to the lives of Ukrainians is the Russian army of executioners and rapists who came to Ukraine to commit genocide. Our defenders protect their people and their families,” he wrote.

British Ambassador to Ukraine Melinda Simmons criticized the report. “The only thing that threatens Ukraine’s civilian population are Russian missiles, weapons and marauding troops. If Russia stopped invading Ukraine, there would be no danger,” she said.

Amnesty International responded to the criticism by saying that the report’s findings “were based on evidence gathered from investigations that were carried out according to the same strict standards and due diligence procedures as all of Amnesty International’s work”.