On the US Senate floor on the evening of April 6, US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer directly accused Russia of waging a genocidal war in Ukraine. “When we murder wantonly innocent civilians because of who they are whether it be their religion, their race, or their nationality, that is genocide, and Mr. Putin is guilty of it.” However, not everybody agrees with Schumer’s interpretation. Just a few days earlier in Brussels, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken demurred when asked the genocide question. Similarly, at a White House press conference on April 4, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan stopped short of acknowledging that a genocide was underway in Ukraine. “Based on what we have seen so far, we have seen atrocities. We have seen war crimes. We have not yet seen a level of systematic deprivation of life of the Ukrainian people to rise to the level of genocide.” It is indisputable that multiple units of the Russian military have committed mass murder in Ukraine, whether by executing hundreds of civilians in occupied towns and villages or by bombarding civilian targets in cities such as Mariupol, Kharkiv and Chernihiv. Russian soldiers have also engaged in widespread sexual violence, the abduction of municipal leaders, and the forced deportation of refugees to camps in Russia.
These actions all constitute war crimes. No one executes over 300 civilians in a single town by mistake or accidentally reduces an entire city to rubble. But do Russia’s crimes in Ukraine pass the threshold to qualify as genocide? Much depends on the issue of intent. Any attempt to determine whether the crimes committed by Russian troops in Ukraine are driven by genocidal intent must necessarily focus on the statements of Russian President Vladimir Putin. For many years, Putin has publicly questioned the legitimacy of Ukrainian statehood while insisting that Ukrainians are really Russians (“one people”). He has repeatedly dismissed Ukraine’s long struggle for statehood while arguing that the entire notion of a separate Ukraine has been artificially created over hundreds of years by foreign powers seeking to undermine Russia. Many of Putin’s most problematic claims were laid out in his lengthy July 2021 essay entitled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” In this remarkable treatise, Putin denied the existence of a separate Ukrainian nation while claiming that modern Ukraine was guilty of occupying historically Russian lands. His essay was seen as a declaration of war against Ukrainian statehood and has since been made required reading for all members of the Russian military. Putin went even further in late February 2022 with a series of unhinged rants designed to justify the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He branded Ukraine as an “anti-Russia” run by “neo-Nazis and drug addicts” and vowed to “de-Nazify” the entire country. The message to Russia’s invading army could hardly have been clearer: Ukraine is an illegitimate state and Ukraine’s rightful place is as part of Russia. Any Ukrainians who insist otherwise are traitors and enemies of Russia who should be dealt with appropriately.
via atlanticcouncil: At what point do Russian war crimes in Ukraine qualify as genocide?