Amnesty International UK defends Ukraine war research opposed by local office

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Amnesty International UK has defended the organisation’s latest research into the Ukrainian war after Amnesty’s Ukraine chief resigned in protest at its release.

The research, which was published by AIUK and other Amnesty offices around the world last week, says the Ukrainian military has “turned civilian objects into military targets” by working from populated areas when trying to repel the invasion by Russian troops.

Oksana Pokalchuk, the head of Amnesty Ukraine, announced on Friday evening that she was resigning, saying that she had spent the day trying to persuade colleagues to change the research but had “realised this will not happen”. 

AIUK said it “stood firmly by” the research, adding that it had also documented “numerous indiscriminate attacks” by Russian forces against Ukraine.

But Maxim Tucker, an expert on the region who used to work for AIUK and was Ukraine correspondent at The Times newspaper, said on Twitter that the latest report “suggests Ukraine bears more responsibility for people killed by Russian strikes than Russia itself. It is both bizarre and misleading.”

Pokalchuk said her staff had no part in producing the research, which she said was one-sided. 

By releasing the report against the advice of colleagues in the region, Amnesty was “ignoring the opinion of the Ukrainian team”, she said.

AIUK published the report on its website and has promoted the research through its social media channels.

An AIUK spokesperson said: “We stand firmly by our findings that the Ukrainian military have in some cases endangered Ukrainian civilians by establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, while – of course – we have also spent months documenting numerous indiscriminate attacks and likely war crimes by Russian forces during their illegal invasion of Ukraine.

“These findings are similar to earlier ones by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and by Human Rights Watch.

“We will not be commenting on specific statements from other parts of Amnesty International, but it is important to note that this research was conducted in exactly the same way as all of our human rights research – with extensive due diligence, internal discussion and rigorous fact-checking.”

AIUK also referred Third Sector to several research reports criticising Russian war crimes.

In a message on Amnesty Ukraine’s Facebook page, Pokalchuk wrote: “The Ukrainian office was not involved in the preparation or writing of the text of the publication.”

She added that, during the initial stage of developing the research, “our team’s arguments about the inadmissibility and incompleteness of such material were not taken into account”.

The Ukrainian office “did everything they could” to prevent the report being published in its final form, Pokalchuk added, but “received an uncompromising ‘no’ to our repeated objections”.

She said her organisation refused to publish the press release on its site or translate it into Ukrainian because it was one-sided. 

Pokalchuk wrote: “Bureaucracy, misunderstanding of the local context, the inflexible system of work, 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 stage of the [first] idea, as it should have been.”

In her later resignation statement, Pokalchuk said she spoke with “Amnesty representatives from dozens of countries” to raise concerns after the research was published, saying the organisation had not taken proper steps to address the concerns of its staff. She said the research had “become a tool of Russian propaganda”.

On Sunday, Amnesty International told Reuters that the organisation “deeply regrets the distress and anger” caused by the research, but also stressed that it “fully stands by our findings”.

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