© AFP Photo / Dimitar Dilkoff
"All sides in this conflict have shown disregard for civilian lives and are blatantly violating their international obligations," said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International's Secretary General.
Comment: Kiev has undoubtedly committed war crimes. Chances are the rebels have, too, based on some reports. But this statement on its own sheds no light on what's really going on, where one side (Kiev) is clearly the aggressor.
The conclusion was drawn on the basis of multiple interviews conducted on the ground in eastern Ukraine by Amnesty International researchers. They spoke to both people fleeing the conflict zones and to refugees, who have already found shelter in Russia's Rostov region.
"Civilians from these areas told Amnesty International that the Ukrainian government forces subjected their neighborhoods to heavy shelling. Their testimonies suggest that the attacks were indiscriminate and may amount to war crimes," the watchdog's statement reads.
Those interviewed also accused both the anti-government fighters and militants in the volunteer battalions, fighting alongside the government troops of abductions and tortures.
The London-based group has called for "a thorough and independent investigation" into the reports of human rights violations.
"Amnesty International is calling on the Ukrainian authorities to conduct an effective investigation into allegations of serious violations of international humanitarian law and bring to justice individuals responsible for war crimes," says the group's statement.
Comment: Fat chance! That's like calling on the Nazi regime to investigate itself for allegations of war crimes...
The human rights watchdog has also accused Russia of "fuelling the conflict." It is supporting its case with satellite imagery of alleged Russian weaponry on the territory of Ukraine.
Comment: No mention of the U.S. starting it and continuing to actually fuel the conflict.
"Russia must stop the steady flow of weapons and other support to an insurgent force heavily implicated in gross human rights violations," Amnesty International said.
Comment: So what starts as an equal-opportunity condemnation turns into a subtly veiled attack on the victim. Nice job, Amnesty!
Moscow has repeatedly dismissed allegations of it providing military support to anti-government fighters in eastern Ukraine.
On Friday, Kiev officials and representatives of the two self-proclaimed republics in southeastern Ukraine - Lugansk and Donetsk - agreed to a ceasefire at a closed-doors meeting in Minsk, Belarus.
Both the Ukrainian troops and the anti-government forces have accused each other several times of violating the truce.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine's leader Petro Poroshenko nevertheless agreed in a phone conversation on Saturday that the ceasefire in eastern Ukraine was "generally" being observed.
There have since been reports of sporadic shooting and artillery fire in the southeastern cities of Donetsk and Mariupol, where at least one civilian was reportedly killed.
Since the conflict in Ukraine significantly deteriorated in mid-April, 2,593 people have died in fighting in the east of the country, while over 6,033 have been wounded. According to the UN, the number of internally displaced Ukrainians has reached 260,000, with another 814,000 finding refuge in Russia.
Let's face it: committing war crimes is the STANDARD in warfare today.
Possibly largely because most conflicts are started or supported by either Israel or the US, both of which couldn't give a shit about law, morality, or anything similar.
Yes, maybe BOTH sides committed war crimes here, but this is not addressing two important issues.
1. What the so-called international community and largely useless bodies like the UN fail to address is who causes these conflicts.
Iraq didn't cause the US invasion.
Afghanistan didn't cause the longest war in US history (because they had little if anything to do with 9/11).
The Palestinians didn't cause the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They had lived there for centuries before the Zionists came and started slaughtering them.
Donetsk/Lugansk didn't cause this war. The people are just defending their homes.
So what is missing here is the pure fact that somebody STARTS these conflicts, more often than not on false pretext, and then at best both sides get treated the same (like when saying both are committing war crimes), and at worst it's the wrong side that gets blamed for everything (unfortunately that's usually the case) - or a third party that needs to be demonized gets blamed, like Putin in Ukraine.
So issues like the one in this article may be relevant, but they kind of distract from the more important facts.
The aggressor is usually either misindentified, or ignored as such.
2. The so-called international community (in practice mostly US-controlled), if by any chance it doesn't do the opposite of what it should, only TALKS and never DOES what should be done.
They may "condemn [something] in the strongest possible terms". What does this mean? Absolutely nothing! It doesn't make fewer people die, it doesn't rebuild destroyed homes, and it doesn't feed the starving.
They now say both sides commit war crimes. So what are they going to do about it? Nothing. Why? Because the psychopaths in power decide what gets really done. All these international organizations are allowed to talk, but they're not allowed to actually do anything of much value.
And so the US and Israel always get away with their crimes. Why do I meantion these two couintries? Am I being biased or not objective? No. It just so happens that when you collect the facts, these two countries are responsible for about 99% of all war crimes, never mind "terrorism".
And they get away with it because they control most of the world by money, media propaganda, and other means.
So the criminals commit crimes, the "international community" "says some things", the PTB-controlled media spin the issues, and the people of the world can't really make much sense of it or they don't care, and so it goes on and on. It will never end this way.
To solve these problems, people have to:
1. care, which includes to stop looking away like it's not your problem
2. be properly informed (trash the damn TV and look for good sources on the Internet)
3. speak out, and force the official institutions to put some actions behind their words (that's the tough part, but realize that the real power of the world is us, because of our numbers)
The problem of this article is that it doesn't contribute to any of that. All this article did was tell you that "some bad things (probably) happened". And the (war) crimes continue.