Russia has given several reasons for launching a war against Ukraine. In a televised address announcing the military assault, President Vladimir Putin said the spread of NATO was a life or death matter. He blamed NATO for fostering governments along Russia’s border — in a region he called Russia’s "historical land" — that don’t like Russia.
But Putin also called Russia’s air and ground attacks across Ukraine a rescue mission "to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime.". "To this end," he said Feb. 24, "we will seek to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine."
Putin has long said genocide was happening in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. When gas supplies were interrupted in 2015, Putin said it "smells of genocide." In 2019, he predicted a mass slaughter of ethnic Russians there on the scale of Srebrenica, a massacre in the former Yugoslavia’s civil war, when Serbs slaughtered over 7,000 Muslim men and boys. In 2021, he said the conflict in Donbas "looks like genocide."
There is no evidence for claims of genocide. But invoking it gives Putin a pretext for the invasion.
If genocide were taking place, civilian deaths in Eastern Ukraine would be going up. According to the UN Commission on Human Rights, they have plummeted.
The count of victims went from 2,084 in 2014 to 18 in 2021. This isn’t a perfect measure. It includes all civilian deaths on both sides of the dividing line in the conflict zone. But...
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