President Zelensky visited Bucha and said what happened there was genocide
Photo: Getty Images / BBC News Brazil
The atrocities committed by Russian forces in Ukraine have sparked widespread allegations of war crimes with some arguing that Moscow has gone even further.
“This is real genocide seen here,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Bucha, where at least 500 people have been found dead since the Russians left.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki agrees that the killings in Bucha and other towns near the capital Kyiv “should be called genocide and treated as such”.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the attacks on civilians in Bucha were “not far from genocide”.
US President Joe Biden, for his part, has accused Russian forces of “genocide” in Ukraine. He said Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to eliminate “the idea” of a Ukrainian identity.
But many countries have stopped using the word to describe what is happening in Ukraine. French President Emmanuel Macron said he was reluctant to use the term and warned of an “escalation of rhetoric”.
Is there reason to accuse the Russian armed forces of committing the “crime of crimes”?
What is genocide?
Genocide is widely recognized as the most serious crime against humanity.
It is defined as the mass extermination of a specific group of people for example, the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust of World War II.
The UN Convention on the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as committing any of the following acts “with intent to destroy in whole or in part any national, ethnic, racial or religious group”:
Kill party members
Serious physical or mental harm to group members
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life likely to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part
Imposition of measures intended to prevent births within the group
Compulsive transfer of children from one group to another group
Did Russia Commit Genocide in Ukraine?
There is no consensus on this.
Eugene Finkel, associate professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University, believes a genocide is afoot in Ukraine. He says there is evidence of people being murdered in Bucha and other regions simply because they are Ukrainians.
“It’s not just killing people, it’s targeting a national identity group,” he says.
However, it is the rhetoric from Moscow that turns into an intention to commit genocide, says Finkel.
He points to an article entitled “What should Russia do about Ukraine?” published by the Russian state news agency Ria last week.
The article argues that Ukraine “is impossible as a nationstate” and even its name “apparently cannot be sustained.” The Ukrainian nationalist elite “must be liquidated, their reeducation is impossible,” argues the article’s author Timofei Sergeytsev.
He bases his theory on the unfounded claim that Ukraine is a Nazi state, arguing that a significant portion of the population is also to blame because they are “passive Nazis” and thus complicit. After a Russian victory, these people would have to be reeducated for at least a generation. And that “would inevitably mean desacranization.”
“For me, the change of tone in Russia in recent weeks, especially among the elites, was the turning point, which we call the threshold of resolution. Not just destroying the state, but destroying an identity,” says Finkel.
“The aim of the war is desacranization…they don’t focus on the state, they focus on the Ukrainians.”
A funeral worker sits next to civilian bodies in Bucha
Photo: Reuters / BBC News Brazil
Gregory Stanton, founding chairman of Genocide Watch, says there is evidence “that the Russian army actually intends to partially destroy the Ukrainian national group.”
“That’s why they target civilians. They are not just targeting combatants and the military.”
He says President Putin’s claims in the runup to the invasion that the eightyear war in eastern Ukraine looked like genocide are what some scholars are calling “mirroring.”
“Often the perpetrator of a genocide actually accuses the other side the target victims of wanting to commit genocide first, and the perpetrator then does it. That is exactly what happened in this case.”
“The evidence is still not strong enough”
But other experts on genocide say it’s too early to include Russian atrocities in that category.
According to Jonathan Leader Maynard, Professor of International Politics at King’s College London, the evidence is still very unclear under the strict language of the Genocide Convention.
That doesn’t necessarily mean genocide isn’t happening he says it’s “very clear” that atrocities are happening it’s just that the yardstick is still unclear.
“It is possible that these atrocities are genocidal or could escalate into genocide in the future, but the evidence is still not strong enough,” he says.
However, he points to the “deeply disturbing” rhetoric of the Russian president, which denies Ukraine’s historical existence as an independent nation. This illustrates a “genocidal mindset,” says Vladimir Putin, in which Vladimir Putin believes that Ukraine is “not real, so it has no right to exist.”
In speeches, Putin has downgraded Ukraine’s existence as an independent nation.
Photo: Getty Images / BBC News Brazil
The risk of genocide increases because of this way of thinking, he says. “But we cannot automatically assume that this rhetoric will lead to action in the field.”
For Philippe Sands there seems to be evidence of war crimes. The attack on civilians and the siege of the port city of Mariupol appear to him as crimes against humanity.
But Professor Sands, director of the Center for International Courts and Tribunals at University College London, says that in order to prove genocide under international law, a prosecutor must show intent to destroy all or part of a group. And international courts have set a very high proof threshold for it.
Intent can be established through direct evidence in which the perpetrators say they kill people to destroy the group. But Professor Sands believes this is unlikely in the case of Ukraine.
Intent can also be identified by a behavioral pattern, “but that’s a tough decision,” he adds. Not enough is known about the intentions of the Russians who allegedly committed atrocities.
“Going into a village and apparently systematically executing a significant proportion of adult males from a national or religious group — if that happened in Bucha — could be indicative of genocidal intent,” he says.
“But at this point we don’t have enough evidence to know exactly what happened and why. I think it is right to be extremely vigilant for signs of genocidal intent as the war in Ukraine moves east and becomes more brutal.”
Alex Hinton, director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University, says war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine appear to take place through bombings and attacks on civilians.
President Putin is displaying genocidal rhetoric, Hinton says, but this must be clearly linked to atrocities on the ground to prove genocidal intent.
“I wouldn’t say this is genocide, as[President]Zelenskyy claimed, but I would say the warning signs are there. The danger of a risk is very high,” he says.
Whether or not Russia commits genocide should not affect what Alex Hinton sees as clear atrocities being committed by Russian forces in Ukraine.
“We know atrocities are taking place and this compels action.