After allegations of Ukrainian war crimes surfaced, President Zelensky slammed the human rights watch group that circulated the claims.

Amnesty International accused Ukrainian forces of intentionally endangering civilians — a tactic often referred to as using human shields. Such tactics stand in violation of international law.

Mr. Zelensky said that the human rights group shifted the responsibility “from the aggressor to the victim.”

“If someone makes a report in which the victim and the aggressor are supposedly equal in some way… then this cannot be tolerated,” Mr. Zelensky said, according to Agence France-Presse.

“We have documented a pattern of Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated areas,” Amnesty International’s secretary general, Agnes Callamard, said in the group’s press release.

In a report released Thursday, Amnesty said that Ukraine operated military posts in schools and hospitals. It also accused the Ukrainian military of launching weapons from crowded residential areas. Amnesty researchers discovered this alleged pattern, they said, as they investigated Russian strike sites in these areas.

“The ensuing Russian strikes in populated areas have killed civilians and destroyed civilian infrastructure,” said the report, which also acknowledged Russian war crimes since the invasion began in February.

“There is no condition, even hypothetically, under which any Russian strike on Ukraine becomes justified. Aggression against our state is unprovoked, invasive, and terrorist,” Mr. Zelensky said.

The Amnesty report did not contradict him. The Ukrainian violations, the group wrote, “in no way justify Russia’s indiscriminate attacks, which have killed and injured countless civilians.”

Meanwhile, the Kremlin celebrated the report. “We’re talking about it all the time, calling the actions of Ukraine’s armed forces the tactics of using the civilian population as a ‘human shield,’” a spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry, Maria Zakharova, said in a Telegram post.