And if it was, and if they did, and if they did, then exploiting these situations as a pretext to strangle dissenting voices, censor free expression and attack anyone not marching completely in step with the views, aims and desires of military leaders, would be irresponsibly oppressive.
Very reasonable point.
The Zaporizhia plant isn't as dangerous as the Chernobyl one if I recall correctly. Even then, I doubt NATO would intervene.
You only need to watch what’s left from the contested territories (Mariupol, etc.) in the Donbas / Luhansk to understand how ridiculously stupid that report is. Those cities/towns/villages are like 90% destroyed due to the indiscriminate shelling, they use mostly dumb artillery that’s not precise at all and unless they would be staying out in the open fields it would have made no difference as to where they were staying. They just bomb the shit out of the places with heavy artillery and then move into the ruins.
I read that the radius of the potential impact would be around 100km.
You don’t need to be fighting just visit the frontline towns to get the understanding what indiscriminate shelling means and how the towns are totally destroyed without any consideration. Instead it will give Russian propaganda an easy cop-out which will be much more damaging than suggesting Ukrainian armed forces to move few meters up the road from the place which anyway will be subject to dumb shelling. Your example is quite a bit different because executing or not POWs is a choice but defending the cities isn’t as there are no viable alternatives. Also, the people have been warned to move out from frontlines cities since day 1 by Ukrainian gov. but many have chosen to stay at their own risk.
Yeah. I've read one comment that also seemed to be spot on (at least for me). People at Amnesty do have this, let's say, a learned cognitive pattern of perceiving any military conflict from the perspective of civilian population and how they suffer from it and from the military combatants (regardless of the side that they're on). And of course the Ukrainian military doesn't do everything by the book.
I wouldn’t be so sure, calling suffering Ukrainian people from genocide as trolls is giving it away I think.
For someone who we are led to believe published the report out of the care to the civilian population this seems like and incredibly miss-placed arrogance.Looks grim
i really don't think there's foul play at all. the woman said russia had continuously committed war crimes.
After reading about the situation in the news today, I'm also wondering if Amnesty thought it was time for a report that's critical of Ukraine, just to provide a little balance in their reporting, and with that more credibility for their criticism of Russia.
i agree, but the fact that you agree with finkelstein here tells you all you need to know about amnesty's independence because you'd be unlikely to agree with him on russia's invasion of ukraine. in fact, you'd conclude that he was in the pocket of the kremlin or a putin propagandist much faster than you'd say the same about amnesty. which demonstrates that this is not an anti-ukrainian agenda but a systemic constant in amnesty's reporting and methodology.
I don’t know the guy but he well could be, one thing doesn’t necessarily prove anything. If he fails to be consistent then that raises serious concerns about his motives.
he isn't. for example israel demonized amnesty over the apartheid conclusion. finkelstein has no problems with that report. russia have denounced amnesty for their reporting on russian warcrimes. ukraine has no problems with those reports. amnesty is typically more consistent and more impartial than the people who are taking entrenched political sides. it's their impartiality that infuriates everyone, not their partisanship.
Well put.
You still disregard the proportionality aspect now, you can’t call yourself impartial in that case and you gonna get rightly called out as a result. That’s not how impartiality works.
that's finkelstein's exact argument about amnesty's report on hamas in gaza. he concluded israeli propaganda. you all conclude russian propaganda.
the lack of proportionality in amnesty's report on gaza. they criticised the use of civilian areas but as has been pointed out gaza is the world's most densely populated civilian area. there is no non-civilian land you can go and defend yourself. the same will be true in ukraine if the fighting moves into cities which it has. the report isn't wrong it just lacks proportionality. finkelstein wants them to say "this all happens but what else can you do?" and the ukrainian regime will want them to say roughly the same thing. the point is that they aren't israeli or russian mouthpieces as each of those states will tell you if you look through amnesty's history of condemning each, and recently, too.
yeah which makes the gaza example more egregious if you follow a consistent logic imo. anyway the russians are using a nuclear power plant to store weapons because the ukrainians can't attack it or everyone dies. did the ukrainians do what amnesty said? i'd be surprised if they didn't. but it's about proportionality.
when they publish more reports into russian war crimes as they inevitably will, how can you then turn around and say "it's russian propaganda". their report seems accurate factually which is their job but i understand why it irritates people politically because the same thing has happened many times before. it's the way most human rights orgs tend to work. they aren't perfect but they aren't state propaganda either.
I mean it’s pretty obvious after they have excluded Ukrainian amnesty team from ‘investigation’.
It doesn’t change the fact that it makes their most recent publication basically worthless from actual content value perspective yet it creates a lot of damage. For the Russian propaganda you only need one report anyway, money well spent. Either people working there are genuinely stupid for them to be relying on information from filtration camps or from Russian occupied territories in general under full FSB control or are simply corrupt. Both are equally bad in my book.
