Quick Take: Dare We Call It Genocide?
The Russian government and armed forces are clearly guilty of war crimes—but is that all?
The news and images coming out of newly liberated areas of Ukraine are indeed shocking. With the turn of the century many people imagined that the bad old days of big wars and mass atrocities were behind us. It was a naïve assumption because terrible things continued to happen in places like Iraq and Syria. But those are remote areas both geographically and culturally; media coverage was fitful and sometimes grudging. Not so in Ukraine, which is a large, Eastern European country of 44 million people.
Atrocity is inseparable from war. The experience of combat is dehumanizing: The ever-present fear of death or mutilation kindles hatred of the enemy, and military discipline sometimes fails to keep those primitive emotions in check. Some of the atrocities committed against Ukrainian civilians may have sprung from this cause. But the available evidence suggests that a deliberate policy of mass murder was carried out in the areas north of Kyiv just vacated by Russian forces. Probably both explanations are valid; this was the case with German forces on the Eastern Front during World War II. Officially sanctioned atrocities were supplemented by others perpetrated on individual initiative.
The President of Ukraine and others have characterized these crimes as genocide—a heavily loaded word, to put it no more pointedly. But while few would hesitate to call what happened mass murder or war crimes, some may hesitate on the threshold of genocide. That would be to compare if not equate Russia’s actions to such horrors as the Stalinist terror famine, the Holocaust, the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, whose victims ran into the millions.
My own opinion is equivocal. Strictly speaking, President Zelenskyy is wrong: The crimes of Russia in Ukraine do not—yet—add up to genocide. But viewing them in the context of history, I hesitate to rely on the strict definitions. Putin’s attitude toward Ukraine is nothing new. The tsars and the Bolsheviks before him also denied Ukraine’s right to exist as a sovereign nation with its own identity. Stalin attempted to stamp out Ukrainian nationalism by engineering a famine—the Ukrainians call it the Homodor— that killed some four million Ukrainian peasants. For his part Putin has claimed that Ukraine is a fake country that really belongs to Russia.
To destroy a nation, to burn its flag, to wipe it from the map, to erase its culture, to suppress its language, to outlaw its national identity—if that isn’t genocide, what is?