Skip to main content

Ukrainian forces ‘put civilians at risk’ – Amnesty


Kiev is routinely using schools and hospitals as military bases, the rights group says

Ukrainian forces appear to have a pattern of placing troops and military vehicles in residential areas, including using hospitals as de facto military bases, Amnesty said on Thursday. Such actions violate international humanitarian law and put civilian lives at risk, the human rights NGO said.
    The accusation is based on research that Amnesty conducted between April and July in the east of Ukraine. In 19 towns and villages, it found evidence that Ukrainian forces launched strikes from within residential areas. In several cases they were targeted by retaliatory Russian attacks, some of which killed civilians, the report said.
    In 22 out of the 29 schools visited by Amnesty they said they found evidence of current or prior military activity. In five locations they witnessed Ukrainian troops using hospitals as bases, which was “a clear violation of international humanitarian law.”
    Most residential areas inspected were far away from frontlines, and there were viable alternatives for military deployments, Amnesty noted. The rights group said it was “not aware” that Ukraine tried to evacuate civilians from those areas, as is required under international rules of war.
    “We have documented a pattern of Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated areas,” Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, said.
    “Being in a defensive position does not exempt the Ukrainian military from respecting international humanitarian law,” she added. “Militaries should never use hospitals to engage in warfare and should only use schools or civilian homes as a last resort when there are no viable alternatives.”
    Amnesty noted that in some places, where it assessed that Russian forces delivered unlawful indiscriminate strikes on residential areas, it did not find evidence of the presence of Ukrainian troops. Ukraine’s unlawful military use of civilian objects “does not in any way justify indiscriminate Russian attacks,” it stressed.
    Responding to the report, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Russia had frequently highlighted the methods described by Amnesty and had repeatedly reported that Ukraine is using civilians as human shields.
    Moscow claims it never targets civilian sites, contrary to accusations coming from Kiev, and that it took every precaution to mitigate risks for civilians when attacking Ukrainian forces in cities and villages
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Donbas communists: our historic mission

  by Boris Litvinov Boris Litvinov, is the First Secretary of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) District of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) Our troops have advanced some 35 to 40 kilometres from Donetsk, which means the capital of the Donetsk People’s Republic is now beyond the reach of Ukrainian artillery and tanks, Now the administrative border of the Donetsk Republic with the Dnepropetrovsk region is just 10 kilometres away from the front. But there are still many problems due to the supply of Western weapons such as missiles and modern drones. So the attacks on Donetsk are still ongoing with weapons supplied to Ukraine from the United States, Britain, France, Germany and other NATO countries. But whatever weapons are used against us the decisive factor is the fighting soldier – the infantry. Of course, many people are now discussing the forms in which negotiations on ending the war will take place, but the question is, who will participate? And what will ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ukraine wants the Bomb!

By Alex Miller It didn’t take long. Just hours after Zelensky’s heated negotiations with Trump, Ukrainian banker Oleg Gorokovsky announced the start of a fundraising drive for a Ukrainian ‘Nuclear Bomb Project’. Gorokovsky is a well known Ukrainian businessman and the owner of  Monobank – the largest bank in the country. He explained to local media that Trump’s failure to provide Ukraine with a “nuclear armed security framework” is forcing Ukraine to act on its own, and called the Ukrainian Nuclear Bomb Project “Yaderka” (Nuke). He claimed he’d received "many requests to start collecting for Yaderka” and said that during the first 12 hours of the appeal a million dollars had been raised to finance the start of work on developing a Ukrainian nuclear bomb. Gorokovsky later tried to backtrack and began to explain that his nuke appeal was a “joke after a hard day”. But Monobank continues to support the appeal to raise funds for the nuclear campaign. The process of collecting money con...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ukraine: Death before dishonour!

An open letter to Workers World from Mikhail and Alexander Kononovich Dear Comrades We would like to first draw your attention, comrades, to the fact that we, communists and anti-fascists, brothers Mikhail Kononovich and Alexander Kononovich, were arrested for our many years of “Komsomol [Communist Youth League] for Peace” actions, which we held in all the cities of Ukraine, starting in 2014.  The last action was two weeks before the full-scale war of 2022 began, held near the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) of Ukraine with the main slogan “No to NATO – Peace for Donbas!” Only communist anti-fascists advocated for peace in Ukraine. We tried to prevent the “Third World War.” That is why being a communist and anti-fascist in Ukraine is already a crime. Since our arrest on 2nd March 2022, we have been in the dungeons of the SBU (Ukrainian secret police) and prisons for eight months, subjected to beatings, torture, abuse, deprived of sleep in solitary confinement and in inhumane conditions...
Post a Comment
Read more