I can’t think of a better person than Tanya Lokshina to go and investigate what happened in the villages of Kondrashevka and Luganskaya Stanitsa, reportedly hit by an airstrike of the Ukrainian Air Force — or shelled by pro-Russian separatists, or both, it’s not clear which.
Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch has written a story for Human Rights Watch: A Day in Luhansk: War’s Crimes, Horrors, and Uncertainties.
Note: this town and the surrounding region and other villages is variously called “Luhansk,” using the Ukrainian spelling or “Lugansk” using the Russian spelling; I prefer to call it “Lugansk” because it’s a predominantly Russian-speaking area. “Stanitsa” is an old word that means “Cossak village” or hitching post.
Tanya, a person who I know and with whom I have worked in the past, is a seasoned, intelligent, skilled human rights monitor who has been through the Chechen wars, and other regional wars and knows her business. She has spent her adult life in total dedication to the human rights vocation — and it is a vocation, that pretty much takes up your entire life. She was with Natalya Estemirova the night before she was killed in Chechnya. She had an established career first with Moscow Helsinki Group and other domestic Russian human rights groups and now Human Rights Watch. So I want to make clear that the problem isn’t Tanya, as her ability to independently convey what she has seen isn’t in question.
Some people have asked whether Tanya has training in armaments and forensics such as to be able to render judgements on the batterfield. She hasn’t served in the armed forces, and she doesn’t have a degree in some military science as far as I know. But she likely has learned enough from field experience, and from working with HRW experts who do have this knowledge, to be able to look for signs usefully and collect the right evidence. That doesn’t seem to be in question.
And the problem in my doubting what HRW says — and certainly what RT.com says — isn’t my lack of sympathy for villagers — it doesn’t matter what their political views or sympathies, no villager deserves to be blown up in his home. The suffering of people is immense, especially when they lose a child, and a five-year-old boy was killed soon after celebrating his birthday. There certainly isn’t a problem to accept that these are terrible, terrible things and that they must be investigated and prosecuted or compensated at the very least.
The question is who is to blame, and the framework supplied for making that judgement, and in this, I think the international human rights movement is ill-suited to make a pronouncement and is biased in a deeply moral sense that ultimately, is not fixable.
And because I think it is by design and by nature not fixable, I think governments and international institutions, while they may go on relying on the good work of human rights groups, cannot allow them to weight the moral compass as much as they do.
Remember, morality in war in the ancient definition is not absence of violations of the rules of war or international law, but a just war that ends war itself so that it no longer goes on harming people. It may be the job of human rights groups to endlessly harry and harass the pursuers of just wars and conclude that there is no such thing as a just war; it is the job of those carrying out just wars to try to be as good as they can, but ultimately conclude that they must address the full picture of morality which has to do with incitement, motivation, crime, and terror — all areas about which human rights groups remain agnostic or blind.
What is a War Crime and Who Decides?
My problem with this story, as with the story of Anna Neistat in Mariupol (another seasoned and competent investigator from HRW) is the framework into which they are fitting, and its problematic premises. In her case, she used the word “Truth” in her headline “Truth, a Casualty in Ukrainian Conflict” while suppressing key truths of the situation that she believed outside the scope of her investigation.
In the same way, Lokshina (or her editors) made the decision to run a headline with the term “War Crimes” — completely sensational, unnecessary, and unfounded. This group that investigated Luganskaya Stanitsa is not qualified to make a finding of a war crime because it is not a state and not an international tribunal; it’s just a non-government group. It can certainly excerise its freedom of speech and freedom of association to make allegations regarding “war crimes,” and does so all the time particularly with regard to Israel/Palestine to much criticism, but itself is not a legitimate, democratically-created institution with checks, balances, separation of powers, due process, adversarial defense, discovery, and all the things that go into courts in making this determination.
Yet it does make such determinations as a moral proposition nevertheless. The headline screams it and the deed is done, without even a “reported” — and it’s not even clear which war crimes are indicated. At the end of the story, you can see that the “war crimes” might be referencing the clear-cut violations of kidnapping and torture of civilians that the pro-Russian separatists have committed, but that wasn’t made explicit at all!
What’s truly implied is the more serious crime of shelling villagers, of whom 9 or 10 were killed — and that the Ukrainian government is to blame for this.
Even though there is no evidence that this was a deliberate strike, nor is there even any evidence — yet — that this was an air strike as opposed to GRAD missiles.
To be sure, Tanya cites the finding of shells on the scene that suggested missiles dropped from an airplane and not GRADs. But it is said tentatively, and doesn’t bear out the use of “war crimes” in the title itself.
Arms Expert Panel
This will be determined by Human Rights Watch’s “arms experts panel” — a body which is secretive, deliberates in secret, and which can take a long time to deliberate, as we saw with the white phosphorus story in which they finally concluded what most of us said on day one — that it was a fake allegation and there was no evidence for its use (and there, too, in its tweet and its headline, HRW hedged, and wouldn’t even pronounce what their own arms panel was saying definitively, for political reasons.) Oh, I get it why such bodies might need to be low-profile — they can’t fall under pressure from states! But it is problematic. You know, like the way they say FISA courts are?
It may be that in “certain circles” the arms panel is well known, it has the support of its peers as credible, and so on. It’s also independent of HRW. But sorry, I have questions, as someone not in the inner circles. Who is on it? Are they credible? How do they make findings? Why is it so secret? Who funds it? Are these the same funders as HRW? And so on. I think these are all legitimate questions to ask. Maybe the answers are “available” but I just don’t see them readily, in which case, they can be pointed out. Many people in the “community” have the utmost faith in the HRW arms panel. I don’t, so shoot me.
Who Should Monitor International Humanitarian Law?
And that’s because I think the entire issue of whether non-governmental human rights groups should be making these findings and judgements should be questioned more than it is. Indeed, it was questioned strenuously, believe it or not, 30 years ago, at the Ford Foundation, by HRW’s funders, as I know from doing research on this subject years ago. The entire issue of whether human rights groups should make the great transition from documenting and publicizing violations of international human rights agreements, i.e. the UN’s Convention Against Torture or the International Convention for Civil and Political rights to documenting violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) in armed conflict was in fact debated strenuously — as it no longer is. A paper was even commissioned on the subject, written by the respected Latin American human rights advocate Jose “Pepe” Zalaquet and his colleagues.
The question was even raised as to whether the monitoring and reporting on IHL violations should be left to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which was on the battlefield and trained in battle, and which operated in confidentiality, usually not publicizing reports in exchange for gaining access. (This has increasingly changed over the years as the ICRC as become more outspoken and one could argue, more biased.)
Hard to believe now, when HRW and others think it is their proper domain to pronounce on IHL, but there it is. Ever since “Violations of the Laws of War by Both Sides of the Conflict” in El Salvador was famously first produced by Americas Watch, it has been taken for granted that not only can Human Rights Watch vaunt itself into the position of the perfect arbiter and the moral equivocator between two sides in an armed conflict without themselves ever having served a day in any army — it is right and righteous to do so.
The problem is that HRW has not adopted an equal and opposite mandate to document and investigate and pronounce on the crimes of terrorism — that’s left to police authorities in states, although HRW has lots of ideas about how “the war on terror” should not be fought. To be sure, HRW sometimes documents the abuses of non-state actors, terrorists and militants and home militias alike, but there is never the robust and persistent approach to that task as there is to calling out states — that’s because states sign agreements and are subject to pressures, terrorists don’t. If you don’t want to get into the minefield of Israel/Palestine and how they have covered this, to much criticism, look at the list of reports on Nigeria and the struggles with Boko Haram. Here is an extreme, armed, crazy terrorist Islamist group that kidnaps hundreds of girls and kills thousands of civilians. But the HRW reports are more often most preoccupied with the problems posed by the excessive use of force by the Nigerian armed forces.
Mind you, to point out that disbalance — and it is a morally reprehensible disbalance in the larger picture — is not to somehow “excuse” states or say they “can’t be held to the same standards” or some other such tripe — which those who dare to criticize the sacred reports of HRW will instantly be accused of — as indeed the founder of Human Rights Watch himself, Robert Bernstein, was accused when he finally cried “foul” about the biased way in which the Israel/Palestine conflict was being reported. It’s not about *excusing* or “not reporting” on a state’s violations — ever — and there is no danger of that in a world where everybody is either in the BDS movement or morally blackmailed by it. The point is that if you are truly even-handed and truly applying international law dispassionately, why, you should go to where the mass violations are. For example, in the Middle East, the countries that forcibly veil women and stone gays and assassinate opposition leaders and mow down protesters in the Arab world, not mainly Israel.For example, in Eurasia, to Russia, where there are massive violations of human rights particularly in the North Caucasus, and to the rebel-held territory of southeastern Ukraine, where human rights violations are massive, and not mainly to Kiev.
But…That’s not how the world works, however, especially at the State of HRW — in budget, in press influence, in number of offices or “embassies” abroad, HRW has more power than some of the smaller states of the UN.
We live in a world where states increasingly don’t matter; hence the name of my other blog, “Wired State.”
This discussion of state actors and non-state actors and what binds them and who should report on them and make findings on them is pretty theoretical and gets boring fast, like a meeting at the UN.
“Set and Setting” in HRW Investigations
So let me turn to more practical concerns about how investigations are performed.
First, there are the questions of what you might call “set and setting,” to borrow a term from psychology and the study of the effect of hallucinogetic drugs.
There are all the questions of permission, language, culture, dependency on drivers, fixers, even armed escorts. In the Chechen wars, HRW accepted armed escorts as did other groups and this wasn’t much debated as much as it should be by the journalists’ corps — they got around the seemingly bad optics with this by taking guards related to the parliament, which was supposed to be democratic and independent of fighting forces, but this is a relative concept, as I found once when interviewing two Chechen parliamentarians, who were asked by relief workers if they were familiar with the laws of war.
“Oh, yes,” they said. “We know those laws of war. Those are rules like this: never go to sleep without tying your rifle to your arm so it isn’t stolen from you while you are sleeping.”
OK, so let’s move on.
The case of Stanitsa Luganskaya is unlike Jenin, for example, where I could see HRW staff were really dependent on pro-Palestinian fixers who translated and “did” for them in the region, and the results then are not surprising, when they can’t seem immediately to admit how many combatants are in the list of those killed.
In this case, Tanya and others obviously know Russian and know the terrain thoroughly — Ukraine is a different country than Russia, but only 20 years have passed since the uniform, shared experience of the Soviet Union, and we Soviet/Russia watchers can all instantly get the culture of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” without a lot of effort.
Even so, it’s worth asking questions about what permissions had to be gained — the DPR and its evil twin the “Lugansk People’s Republic” ask all those entering these territories under their armed control to get press passes or explain their business — do they have passes for human rights monitors? They often have to accept an armed escort. Did they get one? They often have to rely on local drivers who, as we saw from the tragedy of the journalist killed on a bus tour, are men in camouflage who are part of the cause. Did they? These are all valid questions to ask to see if in fact there was more “shaping” of impressions than maybe were let on.
Lokshina writes compellingly of her independence from this situation by candidly describing the awfulness of the scene at the State Administration building taken over by these thugs. The weeping relatives trying to get their people out of horrendous captivity; the casual cruelty; the creepiness. We get all that.
But keep in mind: these awful people are the very same people who have all had plenty of time to set up the scene if need be, and the impressions of the scene, and even add eye-witnesses to shape impressions, if need be.
What Time Was It and Who’s Talking?
A key factor missing from this story is the time — how many hours elapsed from the alleged air or GRAD strike before the HRW team got there? This is important to know, because the “surgical field,” so to speak, is no longer clean and the evidence can be skewed or trampled or manipulated. Yes, these are people savvy at cutting through Soviet bullshit — and Soviet bullshit is exactly the culture of the “People’s Republics”. But still, probing questions should be asked.
I ask because I studied several of the videos from this scene. The first came from a skilled operator and propagandist who, when pressed, said he was from “TNT Saratov.” He time-stamped his narrative in the video as “11:37 am” on July 2.
Let’s just say this gentleman was a long way from Saratov — and reinforced that impression when he called the area he was filming “Lugansk” and had to be corrected that it was “Luganskaya Stanitsa.” He expertly geolocated the film by swinging the camera up to the mostopoyezd or bridge construction train by the long, one-story yellow building nearby, asking the locals what they called that area. That locates it on a map. He then zeroed in on the pits in the ground, maximizing their coverage so that he could strengthen the narrative of the air strike. He never finds any shells in his travels, but he accompanies the film with a string of cynical invectives in the Dmitry Kisilyev vein — this is the work of the fascists in Kiev, etc. He then focuses on some of the people, and their terrible distress and the damage to their homes. There are no raging fires; a few flames flicker, and a gas line is broken with flames at the edge.
Another film is less intrusive and didactic — this seemes to have been done by a local “citizen journalist” who is mainly as shell-shocked as his neighbours – he calls out occasionally to find out if they are alright, and if they have lost anyone, and films people who are wrapping up the bodies of their loved ones in anguish. No one mentions any planes — that doesn’t mean they didn’t see them but it’s not in the narrative. Unfortunately, that one seems to be removed from YouTube now.
Another one is labelled “air strike” but is less didactic from a service that is usually either pro-Kiev or more even-handed:
Some hours later, RT.com and RIA Novosti arrive. Now we have a picture of a flaming inferno and a couple fleeing it — although that’s misleading as the whole town is not on fire, and likely this was one building that caught fire later as its owners desperately remained near it trying to save things, then ran.
And an expert propagandist is now narrating the scene, and she makes sure to ask people a number of times if they heard or saw planes. It was early in the morning on a summer day and they might have been asleep, but some say they heard or saw planes. She doesn’t find any shells, either, although she finds five pits, but amazingly, amid the rubble, she is able to find a man who is an expert on what pilots in war can do or not do as he himself flew a fighter jet back in the day.
This might really seem over the top and contrived — and could be — but of course, it’s also true that the Soviet Union had a compulsory draft and pretty much every male has served in the armed forces, many of them in combat in wars such as in Afghanistan, so it’s not that far-fetched that a villager in Ukraine just happens to be a fighter jet pilot.
This man explains helpfully that the separatists’ camp was only three kilometers away — and thus a legitimate target that might have been the aim, but the village, very close especially from the air, was mistakenly hit. (As you’ll see later, it’s also important to ask what other rebel held sites are nearby, for example, a mined bridge and a checkpoint.)
He adds his analysis that either the pilots were “poorly trained” and their finger “slipped” as they hit the button to release missiles too early, or maybe — “the bastards” — they deliberately fired on the village, although even this victim of the attack finds that hard to believe.
Note: The audio to his statement has been tampered with. It can clearly be heard underneath the RT.com correspondent — who is drowning out the man with an English translation on the spot — that his words have been cut from the tape and are missing. The sub-title says clearly “three kilometers” and she says “three kilometers” — something she seems to forget later in the video when she makes the indignant comment that the separatists’ checkpoint was “ten kilometers” away and therefore very far from the scene of the alleged air strike. We don’t know what he said or added here — it’s obliterated.
We then learn from Tanya’s report that in the other village, the separatists’ checkpoint was only 700-800 meters away — and then realize that it’s even a closer target. Both the Ukrainian armed forces and the pro-Russian separatists battle at checkpoints, a natural place to be fighting and shelling each other. If a village 700 meters away is hit by a shell in these battles, it is not surprising.
Three kilometers might be more of a stretch, as some missiles might not reach that distance, but as the separatists have helpfully explained, this is not a “position war,” it’s a “civil war,” i.e. the “self-defense” is constantly moving and constantly having encounters with the Ukrainian army along the road and in the fields. So cross-fire can in principle take place anywhere.
RT.com — Disingenuous or Naive?
At one point Maria Finoshina disingenuously — or naively?! — comments that her fixer leading her around — “Mikhail” — has said that the bridge may be targeted. I’ll say, it’s mined, and it’s been a separatist checkpoint attacked by the Ukrainian army for the last two weeks, guys! Did you research this before you came? Or you just want us not to think about that?
When we film,shelling starts.Mikola,local,thinks bridge held by self-defense targeted.We decide 2 leave asap #ATO pic.twitter.com/JZWw0EI99V
— Maria Finoshina (@MFinoshina_RT) July 2, 2014
I don’t know at which point the HRW team came into this scene in which Russian propaganda TV had already had plenty of time to rile up the already distraught villagers, but it’s a factor. As you can see from the progression on YouTube of clips, people went from not themselves commenting on air strikes to immediately commenting them. Some clips are labelled “bombing of Stanitsa Luganskaya”; others are labelled “air strike of Stanitsa Luganskaya”.
Russian Army and the Armed Pro-Russian Separatists Active in Lugansk Region Before
Let’s pull back now and look at this scene in the weeks before this tragedy — hey, it’s not irrelevant, and it is a war.
First, on June 20, there was a long line of tanks and armored vehicles with the Russian flag and flags from Russian-occupied Crimea which rolled into Lugansk — this was to help the separatist cause.
Whether you want to see this from the separatists’ themselves:
or just Some Guy on Youtube:
it’s unmistakeable — Russian tanks, under the Russian and Crimean flags entered the Lugansk area in late June.
Then, there was this cheery propaganda show on local television that extolled the virtues of the “Lugansk People’s Republic” armed insurgents, whom they call “the self-defense” or “the militia” — and a frank admission that they had set up a roadblock *in* Stanitsa Luganskaya — and as we can see, likely three kilometers away from it (if the geolocation of the rail bridge is correct).
This video, titled “How the Militia Lives at the Checkpoint Stanitsa Luganskaya” is dated June 21st. This local Region 13 UA broadcast” frankly admits a factor common to all civil wars — although “civil war” isn’t really the term I would use to describe a Putin-instigated insurgency that injects a lot of soldiers actually from Russia, not to mention arms and tanks from the Russian Federation as well. And that factor is that local people bring food to the rebels. Especially the mothers of rebels already killed in the war. They write them poetry and prayers. The LPR fighters are embedded right in their residential areas; they see themselves as protecting their homeland, although, of course this draws fire.
Does that make villages a legitimate target? Of course not, not under IHL, and yet, the fighters are perilously close to those villages and that can’t be denied.
In fact, let’s take a look at Google maps for the area, where we can see the site of the bombing of the village (Ostrovsky St.) and the rail bridge held by the separatists. Indeed, it appears to be about 3 km away (thanks to @djp3tros of Ukraine@war for geolocation of the bridge).
Next, let’s see a video taken June 13th — a little more than two weeks before the July 2nd strike of the village — titled “Stanitsa Luganskaya After a Morning Artillery Shelling”.
So, it’s not the first time that a settlement near this village (Makarevo, in Stanitsa Luganskaya) has been struck — on this date, it wasn’t struck as badly, but was struck.
Why?
Because even before Russian tanks came in as reinforcements, there was a separatist roadblock with a mined bridge nearby, and the Ukrainian army fires on that, and the separatists fire back, and the crossfire hits homes. In this case, the video-makers are blaming the Ukrainian army, but they might just as well ask why armed men have taken up position near a village to fight a war — for whom, and for what — that would risk villagers.
There’s also this: no one has evacuated after this, they are still there on July 2nd, either because they would find it difficult and unsafe to evacuate, or because they don’t feel it is terribly in danger.
So again, let’s be clear of the sequence here:
1) Russian tanks and military vehicles have been sent into this area on June 20th;
2) long before that, the “Lugansk People’s Republic” fighters had taken over buildings and set up road blocks and took positions and drew fire for weeks;
3) the fighters interacted with villagers who brought them food;
4) the village has already suffered shell fire June 13th but people remained in the area;
5) on July 2, the Ukrainian army has either made an air strike, or rebels have returned artillery fire against the Ukrainian army, and the villages are hit a second time, this time more seriously.
Factors 1, 2, 3 and 4 completely live outside of the Human Rights Watch field of view. They can’t exist because they are not about human rights reporting. They are about war reporting and crime reporting, but not human rights per se.
Mariupol Shootings
I encountered that well-established biased frame regarding HRW in the coverage of Mariupol which I wrote about extensively, examining all the videos. I asked, incredulous, why Anna Neistat could not include in her “Dispatch” the fact that armed people in civilian clothing popped up in the crowd of unarmed bystanders and shot directly at the Ukrainian troops — this is clearly documented on several videos, and is clearly the reason why the Ukrainian soldiers turned and fired back at the ground — causing shrapnel and pavement to hit some bystanders, including a Ruptly stringer, and a man who was killed. This video documentation, very well parsed in video by Ukraine@War, which I wrote about as well, makes it absolutely clear that far from using the “excessive force” that HRW loves to talk about with every state, they used minimal force, returned fire only when fired on themselves, and shot at the ground, not people.
Anna’s response, before she refused to debate this further publicly on Twitter and insisted only on a private conversation? That this couldn’t be reported because it would exonerate the Ukrainian army from charges of excessive use of force, and therefore “couldn’t” be part of “human rights reporting”. Circular reasoning if there ever was one, but I’m glad for that debate because it gave me a great insight into the mind of Human Rights Watch: it cannot accept an exonerating back story, background, mitigating circumstances, factors of armed provocateurs and armed rebels, etc. because to do so would mean they were justifying what might be human rights violations by a state.
I find that pretty terrible and pretty immoral logic myself, but that’s just me. Most liberals, libertarians, and leftists accept this without question.
After everything we’ve seen — Russian tanks, insurgents putting up roadblocks and mining bridges and shooting back at the Ukrainian army near villages for weeks — we’re to blame the Ukrainian army for shelling trying to dislodge insurgents from their territory?
Or for that matter, organizing an air strike at a persistently stubborn roadblock that was preventing the Ukrainian Army from re-taking the town?
Alternative “Russian Airplane” Story
But let’s look at the alternative narrative for the airstrike — there is one, although I find it contrived.
Tanya dismisses it rather scornfully as follows:
Ukrainian authorities denied responsibility for the attacks that hit the villages of Luhanskaya and Kondrashevka. They tried to blame the attacks on Russia first, suggesting that the villages were hit from a Russian jet, which sounded rather ludicrous as the region is controlled by pro-Russia insurgents. Then, they said that people died and homes were damaged as a result of insurgent fire from GRAD multiple rocket launchers. The latter version did not seem too credible either.
That paragraph lets us know where she has essentially come down on this story.
But let’s look at this carefully. Why would the fact that an area was Russian-controlled — and indeed it was, as we can see from the Russian tanks that entered it and the pro-Russian fighters that set up roadblocks and fought near it – be a factor that would prevent a Russian plane from shooting on its ostensible supporters below?
It wouldn’t be, knowing of the cynicism, provocation and maskirovka — masking of true intent — throughout this war, when Russians pretended to be local militia in unmarked uniforms, and where Russians have seized Ukrainian planes in their occupation of the Crimea.
It’s not preposterous, given how the Kremlin has behaved up until now — outrageously.
This issue has come up before — whether Russians using Ukrainian-marked airplanes they seized from Crimea in their warfare there where they methodically took over air bases early in the war — could be used for “false flag” operations. This was the question asked about the air strike in central Lugansk earlier in the conflict where several civilians died, when the administrative building taken over by the separatists was subject to an air attack. The target was a legitimate one under the “laws of war” if it was a Ukrainian airplane. “Collateral damage” of hitting civilians near this target, like the woman who came to look at the list of separatists killed on a bulletin board at that building, obviously is not acceptable, in clear moral terms, though understandable and likely not grounds for a “war crimes” prosecution in the circumstances.
Regarding the air strike of a few weeks ago in Lugansk proper, the question of whether it indeed was a Ukrainian plane was dropped, and another narrative appeared which said that the pilots were aiming for a border guards’ base and missed – this was endlessly debated (an earlier version speculated that this was also rebel rocket fire as well) and ultimately people seemed to accept that it was the Ukrainian air force — but not deliberate.
In the case of this Stanitsa, the Ukrainian armed forces immediately denied that they had any planes in the area. They said they don’t shell civilians areas. We don’t know if they bombed the checkpoint, which was close to the village because they don’t specify — and that’s worth probing.
But Information Resistance has another narrative, which is that first, Russian forces crossed the border from Russia, professionally knocked out an air radar station which took a day to repair, and during that period, brought in a jet, which they used to bomb the village deliberately, so that it could be pinned on the Ukrainians.
That sounds indeed like “a bridge too far” even for the cynical Russians, but that’s their story, here’s a full translation. Download Luganskaya Stanitsa InfoResistance
I think it’s possible this story was contrived as an alibi to exonerate the Ukrainians, but there is some remote possibility that it is true. Information Resistance, anticipating doubts, even says they are confident that NATO and the US, which have the equipment to monitor planes flying around like this, will have records of this movement during which the Ukrainian side was “blind”.
It would be a hell of a charge to make for NATO to claim that Russia deliberately sent in a plane to bomb a village and pin it on the Ukrainians. NATO is a multilateral institutions with a lot of countries that are pro-Russian in it, by necessity or political choice, so they are not going to make this charge lightly. The US has less political problems in that regard, but are still shrugging of the after-effects of the “reset” and are also not going to make a charge lightly. Still, it’s worth asking: can they confirm or deny this claim?
I’m also wondering whether the station really was fully repaired by the time a Ukrainian jet might have actually been flying in the area, and whether its malfunction could play any role in missing the target, although I don’t see how that’s related.
There’s still the issue of the GRADS, of which there are no shortage on either side in this war — with a lot sent in by Russia.
Is the Outcome of Investigation Inevitable?
Given the headline of this Dispatch, given the bias Lokshina has already revealed in tending to believe it’s the Ukrainians who are at fault here with an airstrike, given the readiness not even to examine the “alternative plane narrative,” is there any doubt that this story is cooked now? Even the most impartial arms panel will have difficulty working with a free hand given all this — Tanya has already told them regarding Kondrashovka, another nearby village:
“As we collect fragments of undetermined explosive weapons, measure the entry points for size (two meters in diameter suggests airstrikes – and there seem to be no traces of GRAD rockets)…”
So that’s that. Look for the GRADs and their shrapnel, bring it to HRW if you like — but good luck.
Of course, one could ask whether GRAD rockets were in the other village; one could ask whether there was a really thorough examination and how long they remained in the village; one could ask if they are sure they got everything, but the jury is back and we can see where this is going. Such questions will only seem churlish.
Well, air strikes leave big holes and pits bigger than even those shown. Where are they? Will anyone remain curious about them?
Who is to Blame and Who Profits?
So what will happen next?
The cool kids have pretty much already decided that the “right” thing to say about Ukraine, even if you are not going to be so low as to call it a “fascist” or “Bandera” state is that they are “going too far” with all these “ATOs” and they should stop. They should heed Putin’s pledges for cease-fires, they should “cooperate” and they shouldn’t go too hard in defending their own land. They’re already stupid enough to have alienated their own Russian-speaking citizens with this war, so the cool kids say, and they have only themselves to blame if it continues badly.
As Babitsky put it succinctly, Poroshenko can’t go too far with the ATO or he will kill too many civilians and play into Putin’s screams to the international community to “stop this fascism,” but if he goes light, he lets the Putin-fueled insurgents walk all over him and also ultimately gets the judgement of the population. It’s a lose/lose, and won in which Putin wins either way, because of the spinelessness of the international community.
The war is not likely to be over any time soon, and everyone will lurch on to the next incident. It will be impossible to properly investigate this one with the time and care it would require for forensics — it’s too dangerous as it is in the line of fire. The goose is pretty much cooked anyway at Human Rights Watch, but what can they do with this?
Can This “War Crime” Even Be Tried?
They may decide that the Ukrainian army has committed a “war crime,” but they will have a harder time making it stick with a real tribunal like the International Criminal Court — both Russia and Ukraine signed the ICC Rome Statute, but did not ratify it so they cannot be subject to it except with a special UN Security Council resolution, which will never happen as Russia would veto it if applied against itself, and the US would veto it if applied against Ukraine.
Russian or Ukraine might bring suit against each other at the International Court of Justice but that’s not usually how it works with the post-Soviet countries. There’s the European Court of Human Rights that either may try, and good luck. The ECHR has ruled against Russian war crimes and little is done about the verdict; Russia may even at times pay out compensation to Chechens but they won’t acknowledge the decision of justice that put them as a state in the wrong; nothing can force them to, as the ECHR doesn’t have an army, and it’s not the victorious war powers at Nuremberg who forced the loser to submit to justice. The crimes of Stalin never had their Nuremberg; that’s why we’re all here having this conversation.
To join the Council of Europe, Russia had to pledge it would prosecute its notorious war crimes in Chechnya which were found as such by the Council; it never did this, and without any consequences. Finally, years later, Russia is suspended from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe; it might just as lief never allowed Russia to join in the first place, or suspended it over its failure to prosecute the crimes of Chechnya properly; but it didn’t, and again, that’s why we’re having this conversation. Recommendations at the back of Human Rights Watch reports calling for action on these things don’t work; Russia ignores them.
Tanya concludes:
Our quick visit is not enough to determine who carried out these attacks, and whether they violate international humanitarian law. We certainly documented loss of civilian life and property, and if indeed there were no insurgents deployed in these villages at the time, the attacks would have been unlawful. Reaching judgments on these issues is not easy, and a deeper investigation into the actions of both sides is needed.
Well, given that, you might have a) left the title “War Crimes” out of your headline and b) not been so definitive in the early paragraph in which you tip your hand with statements like “two meters in diameter suggests airstrikes” and “doesn’t seem so credible” about GRAD rockets and c) worked at reinforcing that your visit was “quick” by your own admission, even though you acknowledge that such investigations require that you “carefully document casualties and destruction” — which takes time.
But no matter. I’ve concluded after some years of thinking about this and occasionally taking action or supporting others who have taken action that the problem of Human Rights Watch bias is not fixable.
Human rights groups will endlessly going on arrogating to themselves the power to apply their interpretation of human rights and humanitarian law, will endlessly believe they alone have the necessary objectivity and superiority of understanding, and will endlessly characterize states as always assumed to be venal if not criminal, and non-state actors as always and everywhere to be assumed first victims, and only much later, possibly terrorists who had very good reasons to engage in their terror due to their unhappy childhoods.
It’s good if other organizations try to challenge this and call it out and force HRW to be less biased in their work, and to avoid obvious clunkers like headlines about “war crimes” that will be used by RT.com and the gang to harass the Kiev government.
But what’s really required are different kind of moral movements that spring up and are able to unequivocally state where the problem lies — in those who instigate war and mask their support for armed insurrection and those who take up arms in an unjust cause that has only brought more war. Of course, such a movement or party is inevitably political, but politics are more than fine. Human Rights Watch plays politics from under the halo of human rights sainthood, too, of course, but that’s going to be an endless chase of facts. I think it’s better for various organizations, parties, parliamentary factions, and of course states to emphatically decide which side they are on, and if both sides are too immorally repugnant, to explain the reasons for pragmatically backing one side as the lesser evil. The real world, unlike the virtual world of HRW, is populated by the need to chose between lesser and greater evils.
In this story, Poroshenko and the Maidan government is the far lesser evil, and are certainly not the fascists implied. I think it’s good for journalists and bloggers to continue to be critical of the Poroshenko government, and demand investigations not only for this tragedy but the others that were also promised investigations and either don’t have them or have slow-moving ones — the snipers on Maidan being one key one forgotten, and the Odessa Trade Union Building fire being another.
But in the real world of state action and political party action, it’s clear where the problem lies: in the Kremlin. It’s clear that the Ukrainian army didn’t deliberately fire on a village and certainly doesn’t need to add to its considerable difficulties the problem of hitherto neutral or at least not outright combatant villagers changing to hardened haters because their loved ones have been killed needlessly. Everybody has a lot of ideas of how the Ukrainians could do this better, even by not calling it an “anti-terrorist operation” because they believe rebels protecting their homeland aren’t terrorists but just militants.
Yet the reality is, we can’t say definitively “there were no fighters” in these villages. And the word of HRW alone that they saw no fighters in that particular time slice when they popped in, or the word of anguished villagers who were just bombed saying they themselves are not terrorists, are not enough. Clearly insurgents are part of the landscape and move in and out of buildings, stores, churches, gas stations, and yes, homes, because they live in them, with utter casual indifference, arms slung over their shoulders and masks over their faces. Lokshina described these armed, aggressive people in the first part of the story: this is the reality of who is running things in this territory, and given the propensity they’ve had for re-creating Bolshevik methods and kidnapping, torturing, and executing people, they are not a better option than the supposed “fascists” in Kiev.
Hopefully, if they really have re-taken Slavyansk and other towns, the Kiev government will immediately infuse assistance and reconstruction into these areas to build confidence that they should not have been warred upon, and to dispel Russian propaganda. It may be too late for that. RT.com has already been seen by millions, and YouTube is already filled up by hundreds of thousands of views of the Kremlin narrative.
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