The head of Amnesty International in Ukraine, Oksana Pokaltchouk, announced her resignation following the NGO’s report accusing the Ukrainian armed forces of endangering civilians, which angered kyiv.
“I am resigning from Amnesty International in Ukraine,” said Ms. Pokaltchouk in a press release on her Facebook page overnight from Friday to Saturday, accusing the report published on August 4 of having unwittingly served “Russian propaganda”.
Amnesty said Friday fully assume its report accusing the Ukrainian army of endangering civilians in its resistance to the Russian invasion by installing military infrastructure in inhabited areas.
The publication the day before of the document had aroused the ire of kyiv. President Volodymyr Zelensky had gone so far as to accuse the NGO of “attempting to amnesty the terrorist state” Russian, by putting “the victim and the aggressor in a certain way on an equal footing”.
“If you don’t live in a country invaded by occupiers who are dividing it, you probably don’t understand what it is to condemn an army of defenders,” added the head of Amnesty Ukraine.
Amnesty International’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, said she was “sorry” to learn of Ms. Pokaltchouk’s resignation, but added that she “respected her decision”.
“Oksana has been a valued member of Amnesty International’s staff and has led its office in Ukraine for seven years, with many human rights successes,” she said on Saturday.
“propaganda tool”
Ms Pokaltchouk said she had tried in vain to convince the management of Amnesty International that the report was partial and did not take into account the views of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence.
Amnesty said it contacted Defense Ministry officials on July 29 about its findings, but did not hear back in time before its report was released.
According to Ms Pokaltchouk, Amnesty “gave very little time” to the ministry “for a response”. “Consequently, the organization released a report that seemed to unwittingly support the Russian version. Striving to protect civilians, this report has become a tool of Russian propaganda,” she laments.
In a previous Facebook post, Ms Pokaltchouk claimed Amnesty had ignored calls from her team not to publish the report. “Yesterday, I had the naive hope that everything could be arranged and that this text would be replaced by another. But today, I understood that it would not happen, ”she adds.
Friday, Agnès Callamard had assured that the conclusions of the report were “based on evidence obtained during large-scale investigations subject to the same rigorous standards and verification process as all the work of Amnesty International”.
In its report after a four-month investigation, Amnesty accused the Ukrainian military of establishing military bases in schools and hospitals and launching attacks from populated areas, a tactic it said violates the international humanitarian law.
Amnesty, however, insisted that the Ukrainian tactics in no way “justify the indiscriminate Russian attacks” that hit civilian populations.
The head of Ukrainian diplomacy, Dmytro Kouleba, said he was “outraged” by the “unjust” accusations of Amnesty International which, according to him, creates “a false balance between the oppressor and the victim”.