Experts assess what went wrong in Amnesty’s Ukraine report and where the organization got it right

The report shares the opinions of experts interviewed by .

Published last Thursday in the report (you switch to another service) Amnesty accused the Ukrainian army of endangering the lives of civilians by establishing military bases in residential areas, schools and hospitals.

Emeritus Professor of International Law Martti Koskenniemi The University of Helsinki does not find anything scandalous in the report.

According to Koskenniemi, Amnesty’s reports are used to being considered particularly credible, even though the information has to be collected under difficult conditions.

– In war, everyone operates more or less in a gray zone. If it had been said that Ukrainians operate completely according to the rules, I wouldn’t have believed it.

Koskenniemi adds that in a defensive war, placing troops near population centers is understandable, especially if the opponent is ready to attack them.

However, he points out that the legal rules of war do not take into account whether it is an attacking or defending party.

However, Amnesty’s report receives criticism from Koskenniemi for its brevity and superficiality. He hopes that the organization will publish a more extensive report in time.

Along the same lines is the docent of international law interviewed by Ylen Uutispodcast Jarna Petman from the University of Helsinki. He considers the moral outrage over the report to be unfair, as both sides must follow the rules of war.

Petman, however, criticized the report for being hoarse. According to him, the report very indicatively mentions what the rules of war prohibit and the rules that Ukraine has allegedly broken.

According to Petman, the evidence has also been poorly described.

– And it does not accurately describe what Ukraine has done and whether Ukraine acted consciously in doing so or whether it was the chaos caused by the situation. In my opinion, Amnesty should fix these shortcomings in order to make the report stronger.

You can listen to more of Petman’s thoughts in the recent episode of Uutispodcast.

Koskenniemi thinks that the reason behind Amnesty’s criticism is that the West stands so strongly behind Ukraine.

– In the West, we have such a huge need to keep [Ukrainan presidentti Volodymyr] Zelenskyi and his group in pure white, that we pay attention to things that we would not pay attention to in any case if Amnesty were reporting on some other state.

In his opinion, the West wants to see the world in black and white.

For the same reason, he is disappointed that Zelenskyi knocked out the report. In Koskenniemi’s opinion, it would have been responsible to say that the accusations cause concern and that they will be investigated.

Amnesty has been accused of complicity with Russia.

– I think this criticism is bullshit. For decades, Amnesty has drawn the international community’s attention to Russia’s violations. The Ukraine report also states that Ukraine’s violations in no way justify Russia’s actions, and there is a separate list of Russian attacks in which the civilian population has been insulted, says Koskenniemi.

Director of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute Kristi Raik has strongly criticized the report on Twitter.

He accuses Amnesty, among other things, of evaluating war tactics without expertise, of an appalling lack of moral judgment, and of providing Russia with a propaganda tool.

The former intelligence chief of the General Staff, Major General evp Pekka Toveri bring up the same issues.

In his opinion, the report gives the impression that it was made in a hurry and that the authors of the report do not know the legal rules of war or at least modern warfare with sufficient accuracy.

– For example, a school that has been emptied and there are no civilians there is just a building and it can be used for military activities, Toveri says.

He emphasizes that the defending party should also be monitored in war.

– Here, however, the basic setup is that one is waging an illegal offensive war and doesn’t even try to follow the rules, and the other is waging a defensive war and tries to follow the rules, so the tone could be less accusatory.

Comrade adds that nowadays war is not only fought in the trenches.

– Today, population centers are unfortunately a central part of warfare. The enemy often aims for, for example, traffic bottlenecks, ports and economically or otherwise significant targets.

The comrade adds that in southern Ukraine the terrain is often quite open and there is not much shelter available. This is also why battles easily drift into population centers.

– If you stand in the middle of the field with your cannon, it’s a pretty easy goal.

Comrade believes that Russia will take full advantage of the report.

– Let’s fire rockets into the center of Kyiv again and say that, well, there must have been soldiers in the building, because Ukrainians seem to have a habit of putting soldiers among civilians, he gives an example.

Amnesty has apologized for the anxiety and anger caused by the report, but stands by its findings.

Also executive director of Amnesty’s Finnish department Frank Johansson says the organization standing behind the report.

According to Johansson, the authors of the report are experienced crisis researchers. They are the same people who have been investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine for almost six months.

– Their observation that the positioning and movement of Ukrainian soldiers may not have been as it should be is based on both their own eyewitness observations and interviews with locals.

According to Amnesty, in certain places local residents have not been warned about the soldiers’ arrival in the area and they have not been told to leave. This has put civilians at risk.

– Similar findings have also been made by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch, but these reports have not received the same avalanche of criticism, Johansson wonders.

Johansson is surprised by the strong criticism, because in his opinion the report does not say anything particularly exceptional.

– Amnesty does not take a position on warfare as such, but on human rights: that the rules must always be followed as well as possible.

However, according to Johansson, the issues presented in the report should have been communicated better. He estimates that the communication did not know how to take into account the emotional climate related to Ukraine.

– That is, how strongly any criticism related to Ukraine is seen as some kind of betrayal. Our task is to independently and impartially document human rights violations committed by everyone. If we had not published what we have seen, then we would be guilty of bias.

He considers accusations of Russia’s complicity as “absurd”. Johansson emphasizes that it is quite clear that Russia is to blame for the war.

– We have spoken about Russia’s war crimes, condemned Russia as the initiator of a war of aggression, we have documented Russia’s persecution of human rights defenders, journalists and others. The Russian authorities have closed our office in Moscow and our employees have been forced to leave the country to continue their work, he lists examples.

According to Johansson, Amnesty has not been able to publish all the information it has received, as it could put civilians in danger.

* You can discuss the topic until Wednesday, August 10, 2022 at 11 p.m.