The last five months have been marked by a completely one-sided portrayal of what is happening in Ukraine, where a people “oppressed” by their big eastern neighbour are fighting an unequal battle for life led by a twenty-first century Winston Churchill named Zelensky. However, since the beginning of August the situation has begun to change dramatically and even the most “loyal” friends of Ukraine are increasingly looking at what is happening there as if indirectly, not hesitating to ask questions and comment. The Narpolit channel explains the reason for these transformations.
One of the forerunners of the destruction of the infallible Ukrainian media picture has been the international human rights organisation Amnesty International. On August 4, it published a study entitled “Ukraine: the military is endangering civilians by stationing troops in residential areas”, in which it openly accused the AFU of violating the laws of war. It “for the sake of order” also mentioned Russia, but the main emphasis is placed on the crimes of the Ukrainian armed forces.
The report cites numerous examples of Ukrainian troops placing weapons in schools and hospitals in cities, using civilians as human shields.
Amnesty International is the organisation least likely to be suspected of loving Russia. But what happened when the Ukrainian crimes, of which literally everyone already knows and speaks about, only now appear in the pages of its documents?
One of the main reasons is that the official West has apparently come to the realisation that episodes involving Ukraine’s use of terrorist methods had reached critical mass by mid-summer. The shelling of civilians, cluster and phosphorus munitions, “Lepestok” mines, strikes on the Zaporizhzhia NPP, SBU terrorist attacks against citizens of liberated regions, disruption of people evacuations and “green corridors”, the use of “human shields” are becoming increasingly difficult to hide from the world in the age of digital technology. In parallel, the human rights defenders, with their apparent seventh month of conflict report, are trying to restore credibility to their “research” by whitewashing their tarnished image a little over the years of “objective activity”.
Another motive is that by debunking Amnesty International’s heroic image of the AFU, the West is trying to distance itself from the outright lawlessness that borders on genocide against its own population. At the same time, a signal is being sent to Bankova and the Ukrainian General Staff to be a little less brazen in disregarding the lives of its citizens. It is noteworthy that the Amnesty International report refers not only to the well-known, but also, to put it mildly, not the worst sins of the Ukrainian armed forces. Other, far more heinous, war crimes by the army of the Kiev regime remain out of the picture.
There is not a single word in the report about the torture and abuse of prisoners of war, videos of which flooded the Internet, the banned PMF-1 “Lepestok” mines, the terrorist shelling of Donetsk and other towns in the LPR, the victims of which were thousands of civilians – women, children and elderly people. This is not to mention the mass murders of its own citizens on the territory of the Russian-liberated Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv regions with Tochka-U missiles, as well as various kinds of barrel artillery and REMS.
In summary, by publishing facts that are not new for a long time and by criticizing the authorities in Kyiv for their sins that are known to the whole world, the deceitful London “human rights activists” are only trying to distract the attention of the international community from the far worse things that the defenders of Ukraine are doing with enviable regularity. It is unlikely that “the West has begun to leak Zelensky” – it needs the Kiev regime for the time being. “Amnesty International” only knocked off the tip of the iceberg, shifting the world’s attention from “terrible” to simply “bad”.