Amnesty reviews own report claiming Ukraine's war tactics violate humanitarian law

International human rights organization Amnesty International on Sunday started a review of its controversial report in which it accused the Ukrainian military of violating the laws of war. The review of the said report was “initiated at the international level" it announced in a statement. "We are talking about checking the process of preparing the material and the report’s legal and political analysis," the agency stated. “We want to understand what exactly went wrong and why to learn from and improve our human rights work,” Amnesty furthermore implied. 

In a press document, the human rights organization appeared to agree that the research in the report was made public without "sufficient context." They also admitted that it may have incorrectly termed Ukraine's military actions as scandalous. 

“It [the report] did not pay due attention to Russian aggression in violation of international law and the numerous war crimes committed by the Russian military and documented by Amnesty International. … The findings were not conveyed with the delicacy and accuracy that should be expected from Amnesty. This also applies to subsequent communication and the reaction of the International Secretariat to public criticism,” the human rights activists told DW. they further believed that Amnesty's report was in fact the “instrumentalization of the press release by the Russian authorities.”

Most of the research in the report was obtained from the survey of civilians who were evacuated to the temporarily uncontrolled territories of Ukraine: the territory of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions or Crimea as the war ensued. The material was mainly collected from people who were in the filtration camps and prisons, as well as from those who “wished to provide this kind of information." Amnesty declared in its report that the Ukrainian troops had allegedly located their military equipment in civilian residential areas putting their lives in danger as it provokes fire from the troops of the Russian Federation. It further made claims that Ukrainians are using civilians as a “human shield”.

 Zelenskyy derides Amnesty for its 'propaganda report' 

The head of the Ministry of Reintegration, Irina Vereshchuk, called Amnesty International’s statement “absurd and insulting." President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine had condemned Amnesty International for accusing the Ukrainian army of endangering civilians, stressing that the forces have been doing their best to defend their territorial integrity. Zelenskyy refuted Rusia's propaganda that Ukraine's Army established its military bases in residential areas which had resulted in the crossfire and civilian casualties. He lambasted the human rights organisation for what he described  "bias report" and instead questioned Amnesty's inability to call out at Russian war crimes as its invading forces continue to strike the civilian areas and kill Ukraine's troops. 

Amnesty report “unfortunately tries to alienate the terrorist state and shift the responsibility from the aggressor to the victim," Zelesnkyy asserted. Furthermore, he noted that it was, in fact, surprising that such an investigation was even being reviewed considering Russian forces shelled the residential buildings killing civilians every day including children and women, and damaged the civilian properties.