The international Red Cross movement is under pressure to take action against the Russian Red Cross (RRC) over close links between the group and the Kremlin’s war and propaganda machine.
The evidence includes the RRC president’s central role in a pro-Putin “patriotic” organisation, senior RRC staff who speak of the impossibility of peace with “Ukrainian Nazis”, and RRC participation in military training for children.
There are also allegations, revealed in leaked Kremlin documents obtained by the Estonian publication Delfi and shared with a consortium of outlets including the Guardian, that the Kremlin plans to replace the work of the international Red Cross on Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine by funding new, puppet Red Cross organisations.
In response to the previous publication of some of these allegations, the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) said it was “reviewing the claims closely”. It is now under pressure from donor governments to take action against the RRC.
The IFRC, an umbrella body of 191 national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, has the power to take disciplinary action or suspend membership of national societies that violate Red Cross principles. It works closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which works in the field in conflict zones including Ukraine, where it distributes humanitarian aid and has a mandate to visit prisoners of war on both sides.
The international bodies are funded by governmental and philanthropic donors, and often work with local Red Cross chapters. In turn, national Red Cross movements often work together with governmental structures on crisis response, but all are supposedly bound by the Red Cross principles of “neutrality, impartiality and independence”.
Much of the RRC’s activities seem to fly in the face of these principles. The organisation’s head, Pavel Savchuk, 29, was a member of the central staff of the All-Russian People’s Front (ONF), which was created by Vladimir Putin and holds the trademark for “Z”, the symbol of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
In response to questions, the ICRC said Savchuk had not “to our knowledge” been active in the ONF since March 2022 and was no longer a member. A photograph identifying him as a member of the organisation’s central staff disappeared from the ONF website in February this year, shortly after a media inquiry.
As recently as January this year, Savchuk signed a memorandum of understanding between the RRC and Artek, a children’s camp in Crimea that has been hit with sanctions by western countries for its involvement in the “patriotic re-education” of abducted Ukrainian children. The US state department has claimed that some children sent there are “prevented from returning to their families”.
Savchuk hung up on a reporter from the consortium who called for clarification on these matters, directing all queries to the RRC press service. The press service said it could not engage with the investigative consortium as it included outlets deemed “undesirable” by Russian authorities.
Other senior RRC figures have made unequivocal statements in support of the war. In the weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion, the head of the RRC regional office in Tver, Nikolai Dobylev, said the Ukrainian army had shot civilians in the back while the Russian army was fighting with honour. “How can we speak about peace talks when the Ukrainian Nazis are carrying out war crimes?” he asked rhetorically in an interview with a local media outlet.
Valery Burkovsky, the head of the RRC chapter in Oryol, planted a tree in a memorial event dedicated to soldiers who had died in the “special military operation”, as the war on Ukraine is called in Russia. “Every tree planted today symbolises a belief in the victory of justice over dark forces with whom Russia is forced to fight,” said one of the other participants of the event.
There is also photographic evidence of RRC staff in branded Red Cross vests at military training events for Russian youth, where children as young as eight are taught how to use guns.
In one such example, at the “Children’s Spetsnaz” camp in the city of Khanty-Mansiysk, children who were greeted by armed men at the entrance practised hand-to-hand combat, knife skills and shooting from Kalashnikov rifles. The RRC trained the children in first aid, and photos from the camp show Red Cross staff together with children in military-style uniforms.
At a similar event run by the Battle Brotherhood organisation in Moscow in February, army veterans gave military training to camouflage-clad young children. In one photograph from the training, children pose with Red Cross staff with Kalashnikov rifles on the table in front of them.
The RRC and the IFRC did not address specific questions about the images, but soon after a media inquiry the photograph was removed from the Battle Brotherhood’s website.
The leaked documents also reveal apparent Kremlin plans to fund new offshoots of the RRC in occupied Ukraine, showing a 2024 budget figure of 677m roubles (£5.8m), with 115m roubles earmarked for the so-called “new territories”, the four Ukrainian regions that Putin laid claim to in 2022. The RRC working in occupied territory would be a breach of international law and the Red Cross charter.
In June last year, the Russian news agency Tass published a headline stating that the RRC had delivered aid to occupied areas of eastern Ukraine, and a video quoted Ekaterina Sukhacheva as welcoming the aid, referring to her as the “representative of the RRC in the Donetsk People’s Republic”.
The Tass headline was quickly changed to claim that the aid was from the so-called “Donetsk Red Cross”. Later, in August, Russian legal documents show that Sukhacheva set up the so-called Donetsk Red Cross as an official entity.
The ICRC has said it works with the group, helping “financially, technically or through the provision of aid supplies” to reach vulnerable people in the region, but considers it a local group rather than an official Red Cross organisation.
Last year the IFRC suspended the Belarus Red Cross after its president, Dzmitry Shautsou, boasted that the organisation had helped to deport Ukrainian children to Belarus, and Shautsou refused to resign.
Taking action against the RRC would be harder for the international Red Cross, potentially destroying relations with one party in an ongoing conflict. The organisation tends to be less vocal than some organisations, believing quiet work behind the scenes to be the most effective way to keep operating.
Potential disciplinary action against the RRC would only happen after an investigation by the IFRC’s compliance board, but a formal investigation has not yet started.
The IFRC said in a statement: “At this stage we are gathering information. This takes time. Once the claims are reviewed, there will be a decision on the next steps.”
Pressure is growing, however, with several donor governments saying they are monitoring the process closely. The UK Foreign Office, one of the IFRC’s biggest donors, said in a statement: “We await the outcome of the Red Cross movement’s investigations into these allegations.”
A spokesperson for the Swedish foreign ministry said: “Full clarity on these issues is now needed. We expect the IFRC to take swift action in accordance with its constitution, which includes measures such as suspension or expulsion.”
In a written response to Sweden’s Expressen newspaper, part of the investigative consortium, received after initial publication of this article, the RRC said: “The Russian Red Cross does not have cooperation agreements with military-patriotic or military organisations; events held in children’s camps are fully consistent with the mandate of the Russian Red Cross.”
A series of documents leaked from the Russian presidential administration, the most recent of which are dated December 2023, were obtained by Estonia’s Delfi. These documents were shared for joint investigation with the Guardian as well as VSquare and Frontstory.pl (Poland), Expressen (Sweden), Meduza and iStories (independent Russian outlets), Paper Trail Media, Der Spiegel and ZDF (Germany), Der Standard (Austria), and Tamedia publications (Switzerland).
