human rights watch double standard children armed conflict

The soldiers unlawfully prevented civilians from leaving the area. In Malaya Rohan, Russian forces set up a base at a farm, where they parked dozens of military vehicles. Ukrainian attacks in those areas damaged homes and other structures. In Yahidne, Russian forces unlawfully held nearly 350 civilians for a month in the basement of a schoolhouse near the front lines that the Russians used as a military base. Researchers visited all of these locations except for Polohy due to ongoing fighting but interviewed residents who had fled the village. “Russian and Ukrainian forces both need to avoid basing their troops among civilians, and to do all they can to remove civilians from the vicinity.”īetween April 17 and May 31, 2022, Human Rights Watch interviewed 54 civilians in the towns and villages of Mykhailo-Kotsiubynske and Yahidne in the northern Chernihiv region Malaya Rohan, Pokotylivka, Selekstiine, and Yakovlivka in the eastern Kharkiv region and from Polohy in the southern Zaporizhzhia region. “As the war in Ukraine rages on, civilians have been caught in the fighting unnecessarily,” said Belkis Wille, senior crisis and conflict researcher at Human Rights Watch. The International Committee of the Red Cross has noted several means of protecting civilians from attack, including: “the construction of shelters, digging of trenches, distribution of information and warnings, withdrawal of the civilian population to safe places, direction of traffic, guarding of civilian property and the mobilization of civil defence organizations.” Ensuing attacks on these bases killed and wounded civilians. In three cases, Ukrainian forces based forces among homes where people were living but took no apparent action to move residents to safer areas.

In four cases that Human Rights Watch investigated, Russian forces established military bases in populated areas, needlessly endangering civilians. International humanitarian law – the laws of war – obligates parties to the conflict to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians and civilian structures under their control from the effect of attacks. (Kyiv, July 21, 2022) – Russian and Ukrainian forces have put civilians in Ukraine at unnecessary risk by basing their forces in populated areas without removing residents to safer areas, Human Rights Watch said today. An abandoned Russian armored vehicle parked next to a home in Yahidne village, April 17, 2022.

Human rights watch double standard children armed conflict