Credit: Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine official Facebook page
Accompanying the salvoes of artillery between the invading Russian forces and Ukrainian defenders are mutual accusations of genocide. According to the United Nations, this highly charged “g-word” means “to destroy, all or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.” Coined by the Polish-born jurist Raphael Lemkin in 1943 and introduced into international law by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide of December 1948, this played a crucial role in the international conflicts over Bosnia, Kosovo, Darfur, Rwanda, and Myanmar, among others. Genocide is thought of as “the crime of crimes” and, as a result, has become central to the propaganda war between Moscow and Kyiv.
Ukrainians have long accused Stalin of genocide against them in the Holodomor, the murderous famine of 1932-33. President Vladimir Putin and the Russians virulently deny the charge, even though some four million Ukrainians died because of the Kremlin’s policies. (Some Ukrainian historians estimate that up to 11.5 million died.) In the lead up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Putin, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov, and other government spokesmen accused Ukrainians of genocide of “Russian-speaking civilians” in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. This was, in some ways, a perverse response to the accusation of genocide during the Stalin period. Russian...
Russian military command has been lying for the fifth month in a row about battlefield “successes,” claiming that Russian forces are advancing west of Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region. However, this...