Head of Amnesty International in Ukraine resigns after report criticized by kyiv

Oksana Pokaltchouk, head of Amnesty International in Ukraine, resigned from her post on Friday evening, believing that the report published by the NGO was partial and that it unwittingly served “Russian propaganda”. Ukraine, Oksana Pokaltchouk, announced her resignation following the NGO’s report accusing the Ukrainian armed forces of endangering civilians, which angered kyiv. “I resign from Amnesty International in Ukraine”, has said Oksana 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”. Ukrainian army to endanger 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 grant amnesty to the Russian terrorist state”, by putting “the victim and the aggressor in a certain way on an equal footing”. you do not live in a country invaded by occupiers who are dividing it, you probably do not understand what it is to condemn an ​​army of defenders”, added the head of Amnesty Ukraine. She indicated that she had tried to convince the direction of Amnesty International that the report was partial and did not take into account the point of view of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence. A report that has become a tool of Russian propaganda? According to her, Amnesty finally “sent a request to the Ministry of Defense Defence” but gave him “very little time for a response”. “Therefore, the organization unwittingly released a report that seemed unwittingly to support the Russian version. In an effort to protect civilians, this report became a Russian propaganda tool,” she laments. In a previous post on Facebook, Oksana Pokaltchouk claimed that 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 today, I realized that this would not happen”, she adds. On Friday, the general secretary of the NGO, Agnès Callamard, had assured that the conclusions of the report were “based on evidence obtained during wide-ranging investigations subject to the same rigorous standards and vetting process as all of Amnesty International’s work.” In its report after a four-month investigation, Amnesty accused the Ukrainian military of establishing military bases in schools and hospitals and to launch attacks from populated areas, a tactic she said violates international humanitarian law.