The word genocide has become a politicized label often wrongfully applied to score partisan political points. Nevertheless, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, which has morphed into a prolonged war of attrition, fully deserves to be called a genocide. Russia’s conduct of this war conforms in great detail to the definition of genocide approved by the United Nations (UN) in 1948. Russian war aims include the elimination of the territorial, political, economic and cultural basis of Ukrainian statehood. Vladimir Putin himself has often declared that Ukrainians are really Russians (“one people”) and has argued at length that Ukraine has no right to exist as an independent and sovereign state. In other words, this is a genocidal war in line with the terms of the 1948 Genocide Convention. It is being waged with the explicit intention to “completely or partially destroy a group based on its nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion.”
Talk of limited territorial concessions therefore makes little sense. Nor should the international community be concerned about humiliating Putin or allowing the Russian dictator to save face. In reality, the stakes are far higher and include the survival of the Ukrainian nation and the fundamental principles of the international order.
Putin’s own words and writings, not to mention those of his subordinates, point to their belief that Ukraine is really Russia, that it therefore has no right to an independent existence. In this context, the idea and belief system stemming from it that Ukraine has a right to a sovereign, independent existence as a state represents a betrayal of Russia, its statehood, civilization, and not least, Putin’s autocracy as a modern tsar.
Putin has publicly stated that the Soviet Union was Russia–which is not true since the USSR was a multinational state–but according to his logic, the lands belonging to all the post-Soviet states from the Baltic to Central Asia were really gifts from Russia. As he memorably told President George W. Bush at the NATO Bucharest Summit in 2008, “You have to understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a country. Part of its territory is in Eastern Europe and the greater part was given to us.” He then warned that if there was any attempt to take Ukraine into NATO, he would dismember it. This outlook persists to this day.
All the efforts to foster negotiations to end this war have failed, not least due to Putin’s refusal to talk before conquering ever more territory. Putin continues to state that Ukrainians, and thus Ukraine, are one people with Russians and he employs the biblical commandment given to Joshua upon entering Israel to aver that anywhere a Russian soldier’s foot steps is Russia.
Given Putin’s hardened conviction that he is the latest incarnation of the Tsars, whose mission is the regathering of Russian lands (i.e. those lands that Russia covets) and his status as a contemporary Tsar, retreating and surrendering any of the lands conquered to date or yet to be conquered is out of the question.
Therefore, this genocidal war will continue.
Genocide
This war is by no means Russia’s first attempt at genocide. Indeed, the early tsars created the paradigm for this in 1478 when Ivan III (The Great) captured Novgorod, killed or deported its inhabitants and resettled the territory with his own subjects.
In more recent times, Josef Stalin conducted a series of genocides against various smaller nationalities of the Soviet Union beginning in 1928. According to Norman Naimark, the foremost historian of these genocides, the Soviet elimination of an entire class of peasants, the so-called Kulaks (allegedly “rich peasants”) “and the subsequent killer famine among all Ukrainian peasants–as well as the notorious 1937 order No. 00447 that called for the mass execution and exile of ‘socially harmful elements’ as ‘enemies of the people’ – were, in fact, genocide.”
Apart from starvation or other forms of mass extermination, these genocides were also reflected in mass deportations of entire families, including children. In many cases, including that of the Crimean Tatars, who had lived in Crimea for centuries, Stalin deported native populations to Central Asia, and moved in Russians whose descendants cleave to the land and constitute the basis of the argument that Crimea was and is a Russian land, even a sacred one.
Thus, genocide and genocidal political processes have been used by the Russian state for decades – if not centuries – as a technique of self-colonial rule intended to eliminate “dissident” ethnic identities.
As the distinguished historian Timothy Snyder notes, denial that a Ukrainian state or that a Ukrainian people exist reveals an intention toward genocide. Putin’s ongoing remarks and written works, notably his 2021 screed denying the existence of an independent Ukraine, abundantly prove that point. Further evidence can be adduced from the Independent Legal Analysis of the war published already in May 2022 by the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights in Sweden and the Newlines Institute in the US. Merely two months after the invasion they found abundant evidence of mass killings, deliberate attacks on evacuation routes, shelters, and humanitarian corridors as well as attacks aimed at destroying vital civilian infrastructure, including residential areas, hospitals, etc. They also found evidence of mass rapes and sexual violence along with the telling and traditional Russian tactic of mass deportations. In particular, by that time they found that thousands of children had been forcibly deported to Russia to be brought up as Russians. One year later their subsequent report found that Russian legislation was legalizing these deportations while Russian media conducted systematic efforts to portray Ukrainians as Nazis and dehumanize them, another typical indicator of intent to commit genocide.
These are not isolated reports, as the International Criminal Court (ICC) has formally indicted Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, for the crimes of mass deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia. More recently, in an even more truly gruesome tide of events, Russia has even begun to conscript some of these children to fight against Ukraine once they turn 18. There also is no doubt that many other individuals should and might possibly be indicted for these and other crimes. For example, as of this writing the United Nations’ Economic, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has identified damage to 501 Ukrainian cultural sites. So, we see here much evidence of a truly comprehensive plan to destroy the culture of Ukraine, the idea of Ukrainian independence, and its physical or biological future.
Yet while there have been indictments from the ICC, there has not been the outcry we see in cases of other genuine genocides or even alleged genocides. Much of this indifference stems either from Russian information warfare or from the fact that in practice, bringing Putin and the other perpetrators of these war crimes to trial is impossible unless Ukraine wins, and nobody seems willing to provide Kyiv with the wherewithal to accomplish that task.
Nevertheless, a just peace for Ukraine is inconceivable without reparations and without holding those who committed these crimes to account.
Putin’s Goals
This genocide appears to be a deliberately orchestrated one, perhaps even more than the Holocaust, for it appears to have been part of the advance preparation for the war itself. Putin’s ideas about Ukraine have clearly long been marinating in the overheated stew of Russian imperial nationalism to the point where, as his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, his three advisors were Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great – all of whom fought for years to add territory to Russia. Indeed, another advisor said that, “Putin really believes all the stuff he says about Peter the Great. He thinks he will be remembered like Peter.”
However, these observers failed to notice Putin’s equal admiration for Stalin. Indeed, just as Stalin in 1929 portrayed himself as the Lenin of his time, Putin is the Stalin of our day and his increasingly repressive rule along with this war and its genocide resemble ever more Stalin’s dictatorship. In that context, the resort to genocide is just one more example of this nightmarish resemblance, for Putin has not only rehabilitated Stalin and many of his excesses, including genocide, he–like Stalin–has bet the farm, so to speak.
The Broader War
Since Putin views himself as the latest of the Tsars whose mission it is to regather Ukraine into Russia, he cannot afford to lose Ukraine. Consequently, he has tied both his and his state’s destiny to victory and will not stop unless his forces are decisively defeated, i.e. they leave Ukraine and Russia is compelled to accept and recognize an independent sovereign Ukraine. Neither will he (or probably his successors) stop equating Russian lands with those of the USSR. This means permanent warfare in Europe. And indeed, we are already seeing Russian-sponsored forces carrying out a continent-wide campaign of arson, crime, assassinations, subversion, cyber-strikes, etc.
Victory in Ukraine will generate calls to regain Moldova, reassimilate Belarus, and even to take on the Baltic States, which Putin and his henchmen already accuse of mistreating Russians and attacking Russian culture, the eternal pretext of tsarist and Soviet imperialism. Should that happen, the current genocide in Ukraine will not be the last one unleashed by Russia in an effort to reclaim its empire, imperial privileges, and status.
Therefore, future commentary on this war needs to make the argument that this war, apart from its extremely dangerous geopolitical implications, has been an intended genocide in the original sense of that word, since its inception. It is threatening not only because of its efforts to upend the post-Cold War European settlement but because it represents another manifestation of the criminalization of politics and the triumph of that process. As we and others have shown, the Russian genocide in Ukraine is linked as well to the recrudescence of Stalinism in Russia. Therefore, if Russia is not stopped in Ukraine, that revival of Stalinism will not be confined to Russia but its advocates will attempt to forcibly impose it on millions of people.
Indeed, this war represents a continuation of the depressing trend in the last 30 years towards the return of genocide, for example in Rwanda, South Sudan, etc. The fact that little has been done either to publicize the fact of this genocide attests to the continuing dominance of force and power over law in world politics. That trend abets Russia’s ambition because defeat risks the arrest, incarceration, and trial of all those who have been indicted, starting with Vladimir Putin. So clearly Putin, by starting and continuing war, has no incentive to stop or negotiate in good faith with Ukraine–let alone accept defeat.
The evidence, ethnic and national, of this genocide is incontestable, so Putin’s ambition to reclaim the tsarist and imperial legacy at home and abroad must be recognized as more than an invasion of Ukraine but also as a threat to any concept of international law and/or order. Failure to support Ukraine’s just cause opens the door to future such wars and genocides across the globe, not only in Europe. As the history of the world since the Holocaust shows, there are far too many actors in world politics who entertain notions about eliminating ethnic, religious, class, national or other minorities who could be deemed to be troublesome or dissident.
In this context we need only cite China’s slow-motion genocide against the Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, following the decades-long erasure of Tibetan life. If we fail to suppress the malefactors of these great crimes their successors will be emboldened. Indeed, here we may only remember Adolf Hitler’s remarks about the Armenian genocide that Turkey still refuses to acknowledge. On Aug. 22, 1939, nine days before he launched World War II, Hitler told his officers that he was ready to emulate Genghis Khan and slaughter millions and that they should not flinch from this need to gain lebensraum (living space) for Germany in the East, for, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
If the Ukrainian genocide is not stopped, then future generations of despots may well pose this same question. And nobody will question them.
Stephen Blank, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI).
