Thread by @tincazzi

Long thread 🧵on the Amnesty International issue and its controversial report on #Ukraine (English version) In June I was in #Mykolaiv, in the south of the country. Every day the Russians bombarded the neighbourhood where I was with artillery, missiles and cluster bombs 1-14

2 - (one exploded 300 metres from me). Then I moved 5 km away from the Russians and lived for about ten days in a place on the #Dnipro river. Same situation. constant Russian shelling on the village. The Ukrainian artillery was not in the village. It was far away.

3- In those days Amnesty contacted me on Fb to ask me about the situation. I gave them my Ukrainian phone number. Nothing. I contacted the person again, he read and didn't even reply. Then that report comes out. Totally decontextualised from the ongoing conflict

4- I read it in good faith and say to myself, well sure, I also slept in a former school where there was a battalion. But there were no armoured vehicles or artillery pieces. A place to sleep, take rotation from the frontline and feed hundreds of soldiers. One day we evacuated.

5- the commander had received an intel report about a potential Russian bombing of the facility and evacuated the building for fear that civilians might be involved in the surrounding area,as well as his soldiers. then I asked myself, and I saw this several times with my own eyes

6 -“but in the disputed villages on the zero line, in the grey zone, as is often the case, where a large part of the population has left, where the fuck do the soldiers sleep?in a barracks that does not exist and that would be 100% immediately bombed? On the ground in the fields?

7- It is obvious that if you move from village to village or town to town you use suitable facilities, whether private homes or public buildings, it is a necessity to do so. But contrary to what Amnesty says in that report, I did not see any shooting and I did not see artillery

8- being used on and from populated areas even where the inhabitants did not want to leave, and I would have kicked their asses and taken them away if my men had died bringing food and aid because of them, but despite this, the Ukrainians were risking their lives

9- to bring aid with volunteers and not bombing the area. In the villages and countryside there is not much: the school and the cultural centre, shops. And sometimes the administration building. Full stop.

10- There's not a fucking thing else except businesses and houses. And the Russians often know everything, who is where and how. I could tell dozens and dozens of these stories I experienced first-hand in almost four months of frontline and thousands of kilometers

11- I travelled across the country. Then I’ve read the Amnesty report again, in good faith, and I wonder where those people live, who have compiled with 4 testimonies a conflict that involves 40million people with absurd statements, because the cities have become fortifications

12- and also combat zones house by house, the cities have also become fortresses because the citizens, the military and civilian volunteers, the soldiers of their country that they are defending, have transformed them as such, because they are resistant,

13- not aggressors, because there is a military invasion and there is no clear separation between civilians and military, often. In the volunteer centres, aid is collected for fighters and for civilians. so? are they a target? No, they are not and this in no way justifies bombing

13 - entire towns and villages indiscriminately as the Russians do. And this below, the tweet from the Russian embassy in London (yes, the one that a few days ago said that the Ukrainian prisoners in Mariupol should be hanged) is the result of Amnesty's report,

14- a report without context that has seen the Ukrainian branch of the NGO protest and created disagreements in the Italian one, which has shown unethical and strongly ideologised behaviour in the past. Congrats!
#Ukraine #humarights #Amnestyinternational #russianinvasion