Amnesty International Ukraine Director Oksana Pokaltchouk announced her resignation following the NGO’s report accusing the Ukrainian armed forces of endangering civilians, angering Kyiv.
“I resign from Amnesty International in Ukraine,” Oksana Pokaltchouk said in a press release on her Facebook page overnight from Friday to Saturday, accusing the report published on August 4 of having inadvertently served “Russian propaganda”.
Amnesty said on Friday that it fully embraces its report accusing the Ukrainian military of endangering civilians in its resistance to the Russian invasion by setting up military infrastructure in populated areas.
The previous day’s publication of the document had aroused the ire of Kyiv. President Volodymyr Zelensky had even accused the NGO of “trying to grant amnesty to the Russian terrorist state”, by putting “in a certain way the victim and the aggressor on an equal footing”.
“If you don’t live in a country invaded by occupants who are dividing it, you probably don’t understand what it is to condemn an army of defenders,” added the head of Amnesty Ukraine.
He said that he tried to convince Amnesty International management that the report was biased and did not take into account the views of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.
A report that has become a Russian propaganda tool?
According to her, Amnesty finally “sent a request to the Ministry of Defence” but “gave very little time for a response”. “Therefore, the organization unknowingly published a report that seemed to support the Russian version. In an effort to protect civilians, this report became a Russian propaganda tool,” she laments.
In a previous Facebook post, Oksana Pokaltchouk claimed that Amnesty had ignored calls from her team not to publish the report.
“Yesterday I had the naive hope that everything could be fixed and that this text would be replaced by another. But today I realized that it would not happen, ”he adds.
On Friday, the NGO’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, said the report’s conclusions were “based on evidence obtained during large-scale investigations subject to the same rigorous standards and verification process as all of Amnesty International’s work.”
In its report following a four-month investigation, Amnesty accused the Ukrainian military of setting up military bases in schools and hospitals and launching attacks from populated areas, a tactic it said violates international humanitarian law.
Source: BFM TV
