Why we need to challenge Russia's human shields narrative

reprinted with permission from Al Jazeera

by Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon

Since Russia's invasion began in late February 2022, universities, schools, theatres, hospitals, and many other civilian sites in Ukraine have been destroyed by Russian shelling and more than four million people have so far fled the country. Faced with the devastating consequences of its actions, Russia has increasingly fallen back on a single legal justification: human shields. Indeed, Moscow repeatedly suggested that Ukraine's military is deliberately using civilians as a screen to defend legitimate military targets.

On February 25, just hours after the invasion began, Russian President Vladimir Putin appealed directly to the "personnel of the armed forces of Ukraine: "do not allow neo-Nazis and (Ukrainian right-wing radical nationalists) to use your children, wives and elders as human shields."

Echoing his leader, Major General Igor Konashenkov, chief spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defence, stated in a press conference on February 28 that "the armed forces of the Russian Federation strike only at military targets." Discussing the capital Kyiv he added that "the leadership of Ukraine and the authorities of the city, having announced a curfew, are persuading the residents of the capital to stay in their homes." This, he concluded, "once again proves that the Kyiv regime uses the residents of the city as a 'human shield' for the nationalists who have deployed artillery units and military equipment in residential areas of the capital."

Then on March 3, Moscow accused Ukrainian authorities of holding a group of 6,000 Indian students and other foreign nationals as "human shields". Indian authorities themselves denied the claim. A couple of days later, Putin declared that "the neo-Nazis" were obstructing the creation of humanitarian corridors requested by the Ukrainian government to evacuate civilians trapped in the line of fire, claiming "the militants" were keeping the potential evacuees as human shields.

Russia has repeated similar claims in diplomatic arenas such as the United Nations Security Council. On social media too Russian diplomats have attempted to shape perceptions of the battlefield, portraying the Ukrainian resistance as guilty of war crimes by insisting that they have used "human shields".

Thus, alongside the war on the ground, we have been witnessing an intense information war, which, as the Russian ambassador at the UN exclaimed, appears to be a vital element of Russia's so-called "special operation".

The human shield accusation has actually become an increasingly common defence when states act immorally. As we show in our recent book on human shields, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Israel, Sri Lanka, and India are just some of the states that have deployed the argument to justify high civilian casualties in recent years.

This is partly because legally it appears to be such a useful get-out clause. The legal provision within international law pertaining to human shields states that "the presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations."

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