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In our original Ukraine Narratives documentary we mentioned, in passing, that both the Russians and Ukrainians of this conflict had accused each other of genocide. Much like the topic of how Ukraine historically progressed towards the current war, this is an issue that now must be explored in more depth.
To understand claims of genocide, we first have to understand what genocide actually is. The UN has a page dedicated to this topic, explaining the meaning of genocide in great detail:
The word “genocide” was first coined by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. It consists of the Greek prefix genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing. Lemkin developed the term partly in response to the Nazi policies of systematic murder of Jewish people during the Holocaust, but also in response to previous instances in history of targeted actions aimed at the destruction of particular groups of people. Later on, Raphäel Lemkin led the campaign to have genocide recognised and codified as an international crime.
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The popular understanding of what constitutes genocide tends to be broader than the content of the norm under international law. Article II of the Genocide Convention contains a narrow definition of the crime of genocide, which includes two main elements:
A mental element: the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”; and
A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:
Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
The intent is the most difficult element to determine. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
Importantly, the victims of genocide are deliberately targeted - not randomly – because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the Convention (which excludes political groups, for example). This means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, and not its members as individuals. Genocide can also be committed against only a part of the group, as long as that part is identifiable (including within a geographically limited area) and “substantial.
In short, genocide is an attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, partially or fully, and for a crime to be considered genocide it must have been committed deliberately and knowingly.
And we all know what accusations of genocide imply, cold, calculated mass murder on an industrial scale, we all know the one case study burned into everyone’s mind when we hear this word, the Holocaust.
The Russian state’s constant comparisons with Nazism and World War II when talking about the Ukraine conflict show a very deliberate attempt to exploit this mental image, a world where Ukraine is a modern day Fascist project, attempting to exterminate the victimised Russian world, the narrative was that for 8 years the world had ignored a silent massacre of Donbas by Ukraine, almost as if to draw a parallel with those who turned a blind eye to the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis, ironic when you consider that only a few months before the so-called “Special Military Operation” the Russian authorities were proclaiming that they had no involvement in the Donbas conflict.