The image of a pregnant woman covered in rubble and blood and lying on a stretcher staring blankly outside a Mariupol hospital is still a horror symbol of the war in Ukraine. The photograph, which went around the world in March, remains evidence of the cruelty with which the soldiers of Putin have deliberately attacked to the Ukrainian civilian population.
A violation of international humanitarian law (IHL) that the Ukrainian Army would also have committed, according to Amnesty International in a report published this Thursday. The NGO accuses Zelenski’s forces of “endanger the civilian population“by frequently operating in residential areas, including schools and hospitals, to slow down the Russian advance.
“We have documented a pattern in which Ukrainian forces endanger civilians and violate the laws of war when they operate in populated areas”, explained Agnès Callamard, general secretary of the organisation, who also reminded kyiv that “being in a defensive position does not exempt one from respecting international humanitarian law”.
Ukrainian emergency workers and volunteers carry an injured pregnant woman from the maternity hospital destroyed by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, on March 9.
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The evidence was collected between April and July by an Amnesty International team that spent several weeks investigating the attacks perpetrated by the Russian army in the Kharkov, Donbas and Mykolaiv regions.
After interviewing survivors, witnesses and relatives of victims, and carrying out weapons analysis, Amnesty International concluded that Russia had committed war crimes. This is the case of Bucha, where, liberating the city, the Ukrainian forces streets were found blocked by tanks and littered with civilian corpses that had accumulated for days.
[Al menos 8 muertos en un ataque ruso contra una parada de autobús en una ciudad de Donetsk]
In most of the big emplacements there was no sign of the kyiv armed forces. Nevertheless, “in 19 towns and villages” From those regions, the NGO claims to have found evidence that Ukrainian soldiers “had launched attacks from populated residential areas” and had “established in civil buildings” several kilometers from the front lines.
All without asking the civilian population to evacuate neighboring buildings and without “effectively warning of a possible attack.” this performance violates some of the basic principles contained in the Geneva Convention on the Protection of the Civilian Population.
Specifically, the obligation to “take all possible precautions when attacking military objectives or when locating such objectives, in order to avoid or minimize incidental civilian loss and damage”.
Attacks from residential areas
In this sense, the Amnesty International document collects the testimony of a Ukrainian woman who lost her son during a rocket attack in June in a town south of Mykolaiv. “The military were in a house next to ours and my son often brought food to the soldiers. I begged him several times to stay away because he feared for his safety,” he begins.
“The military were in a house next to ours and my son often brought food to the soldiers”
“That afternoon, when the attack occurred, my son was in the patio of our house. He died on the spot. His body was torn to shreds. Our house was partially destroyed,” the victim’s relative said, according to the report.
Another testimony collected by the organization also attests to military activity in residential areas. “I don’t understand why our army fires from the cities and not from the countryside,” laments a resident of the Lisichansk neighborhood, bombed on numerous occasions.
Bases in hospitals and schools
The laws of war also oblige both parties to the conflict “to protect and respect civilian hospitals.” Also “to ensure that these are as far as possible from military objectives“. Some obligations that, according to Amnesty International, the Ukrainian army would have ignored.
And it is that according to the investigation, the Ukrainian forces used hospitals as de facto military bases in at least five places. “In two cities, dozens of soldiers rested, spent time and had their meals in hospitals, while in another city soldiers fired from the vicinity of the health center,” the document states.
A baby stroller on the ground after a Russian bombing,
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And a specific attack is cited: that of April 28. That day, a Russian missile injured two people who worked in a medical laboratory in a Kharkov suburb, where Ukrainian troops had established a base on the premises.
In the more than 160 days of war, the Kremlin’s army has attacked numerous schools and universities. And in some of those educational centers the Ukrainian soldiers had established military settlements. This is what the humanitarian organization maintains, which claims to have found signs of military activity “current or past” in cities and towns in the Donbas and Mykolaiv area.
These violations, however, “do not in any way justify Russia’s indiscriminate attacks, which have caused the death and injury of countless civilians,” the document states. And it specifies that “many of the Russian attacks” have been carried out with weapons “inherently indiscriminate“, including cluster munitions, which are prohibited.
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