 I was honoured to be recently asked to write a short article on 'Atrocity Crimes in Ukraine and the Question of Genocide' for the German journal Wissenschaft und Frieden. In this article, I summarise current evidence on atrocities committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, and the ways in which we might, and might not, describe these atrocities as genocide.
You can find the online German version of the article here: https://wissenschaft-und-frieden.de/blog/debatte/leader-maynard-graeueltaten-voelkermord-ukraine/. An English language translation of the article is below: Atrocity Crimes in Ukraine and the Question of Genocide The year 2022 will be remembered in history, not just for the return of major war to the European continent with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but for the worst abuses against civilian populations in Europe since at least the 1991-1995 Yugoslav Wars. Mounting evidence has emerged of Russian military forces engaging in three particular kinds of unlawful violence against civilians: a) the indiscriminate and intentional bombardment of civilian areas; b) targeted killings, rapes and torture of civilians by Russian forces; and c) the effective forced deportation of as many as 1.6 million Ukrainians, many of these into Russia. There is also evidence of law-of-war violations by Ukrainian troops, in particular mistreatment of Russian prisoners of war. But the scale of these abuses appears far lower, and Ukraine, unlike Russia, has generally cooperated with the United Nations International Commission of Inquiry investigating abuses by both sides in the conflict, as well as the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has, as of 21 November 2022, confirmed 6,595 civilians killed in the conflict – but emphasises that the real number will be much higher. In March 2022, the International Criminal Court opened an investigation into alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity or crimes of genocide in Ukraine. How should we describe these acts of violence by Russian military forces? Governments, the United Nations, other international organizations, and scholars have increasingly come to collectively label war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide as ‘atrocity crimes.’ When such crimes are especially large-scale (typically if they involve 1,000 or more victims within a year) they are often labelled ‘mass atrocities.’ With the available evidence, it seems clear that Russian military forces have committed atrocity crimes in the form of war crimes – violations of the laws of war, as embodied in documents like the Geneva Conventions. This is typically the easiest category of atrocity crime to demonstrate – and Ukraine alleges that at least 34,000 possible war crimes have been committed by Russian forces. It seems highly likely that violence against civilians by Russian forces would also constitute crimes against humanity – which more specifically denotes a range of abuses that are, under the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, “part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack.” Since the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry found abuses “in all regions on which it has focused thus far”, this criterion also seems likely to have been met. The question of genocide Many politicians, civil society organizations, and scholars have, however, gone further. In March, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly accused the Russian government of committing genocide in Ukraine, and the Ukrainian prosecutor general, Andriy Kostin, has confirmed that he is preparing a case against Russia for genocide. This accusation was prominently backed in April by leading Holocaust scholar Eugene Finkel, himself born in Ukraine. In August, the leading genocide-prevention organization Genocide Watch issued a Genocide Emergency in Ukraine, declaring that Russian policies which it labelled ‘urbicide’ – i.e. violence aimed at destroying whole cities – amounted to genocide. Genocide Watch is one of 21 civil society organizations to have now signed an open letter supporting a US Senate Resolution labelling Russia’s actions in Ukraine ‘genocide’. This is, however, a contentious claim – and many genocide scholars (myself included) and specialist NGOs concerned with genocide have held back from this language. The question, here, is not about how bad Russian atrocities in Ukraine are. While ‘genocide’ has sometimes been called ‘the crime of crimes’, it does not simply refer to atrocities that are really awful or large-scale. No serious scholars or respected NGOs deny that Russian military forces are committing massive and appalling abuses against Ukrainian civilians. Such atrocities are atrocities whether they are genocidal or not. But genocide has a more specific legal meaning, defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention, as follows: “[A]ny of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” These are complex criteria, and what counts as “intent to destroy, in whole or in part,” has been subject to extensive legal and scholarly debate. Some, such as the influential genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses, even suggest that the concept of genocide is not fit for purpose, and should be largely abandoned. When do atrocities constitute genocide? Disagreements over whether Russia can be said to be committing genocide in Ukraine are therefore not primarily about the nature of the available evidence, but about what kind and threshold of evidence is necessary to confidently conclude that genocide is being committed. Many genocide scholars think it best to broadly stick to the meaning outlined in the Genocide Convention – because it is the Convention that gives genocide it’s key legal implications, because the Genocide Convention is the closest thing we have to a consensus statement by the international community on genocide, and because other rival definitions of genocide are often more easily politicised or manipulated. Genocide in this sense involves two key elements: (i) “group-selective mass violence” and (ii) an aim of “group destruction” (to use political scientist Scott Straus’ language). First, people must be targeted with violence because they are members of specific national, ethnic, racial or religious groups – not simply, for example, because of their own behaviour, their political beliefs, their obstacles to military operations, or their private wealth that could be looted. Second, violence must be employed as a means for destroying the group – as opposed to, for example, terrorising the group to surrender, or willingly killing civilians in an effort to also kill military forces that are embedded amongst the civilian population. Many war crimes or crimes against humanity do not display these two features. For example, Russia appears clearly engaged in indiscriminate bombardments of civilian areas. But if such violence is simply intended to undermine civilian morale and demolish potential defensive sites for military forces then, while it remains a war crime, it does not constitute genocide. Both these elements of genocide are complex to assess. Amongst many other problems, large-scale violence is often guided by multiple motives, so perpetrators could be in-part concerned with non-genocidal aims like military advantage or looting, and yet be willing to intentionally wipe out a whole civilian group in pursuit of those aims – which would constitute genocide. Indeed, genocidaires often portray their assault on civilian populations as a political and military necessity due to the threat they see civilians as representing – however delusional this perception actually is. Both the Nazi government during World War II and the Hutu Power government in Rwanda in 1994 made such claims about their victims, for example. Moreover, it is not necessary for perpetrators to try and wipe out a group entirely for something to count as genocide. Indeed, few genocidal perpetrators in history have been able to wipe out every last member of a group in this manner. What matters is whether the perpetrators nevertheless seek to physically eliminate a group to the extent they are able to do so. What can we say about genocide in Ukraine? A quite demanding mix of evidence is therefore required in order to confidently conclude that a given set of atrocities counts as ‘genocide’ in this legal sense. Evidence of the broad attitudes, intentions and ideologies of the perpetrators – both political/military commanders and their ‘rank and file’ subordinates – is one important element. We do have clear evidence of support for genocidal ideology amongst the Russian political elite. Most obviously, the rambling and historically inaccurate speech with which President Putin launched his invasion effectively denied Ukraine’s existence as an independent nation. On 3rd April, the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti published an editorial that called for the Ukrainian people to be killed in large numbers since they were all essentially Nazis. “Denazification,” the author wrote, “is inevitably also De-Ukrainianization.” [https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/kremlin-editorial-ukraine-identity-1.6407921] This is classic genocidal ideology: matching the kinds of justifications found in the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, Armenian Genocide, and all other major cases. Yet such genocidal rhetoric alone is not enough to conclude that atrocities ‘on the ground’ are actually genocidal in nature. Government rhetoric might be largely a means for mobilising public support or sowing confusion about the conflict, with quite different rationales actually shaping violence ‘on the ground.’ We therefore need to also examine the actual pattern of violence being perpetrated. In the case of Ukraine, we need to examine whether Russian military forces appeared to be engaged in an effort to physically eliminate Ukrainians as far as it is feasible for them to do so, or whether they are targeting civilians for other, non-genocidal purposes, such as to terrorise the population into surrendering. This, of course, is difficult. With the conflict in Ukraine still ongoing, reliable data on Russian atrocities is uneven. But most of the violence looks plausibly like terror bombardments, indiscriminate attacks on civilian infrastructure, and attacks that willingly kill civilians in an effort to also kill Ukrainian military forces or render cities unviable for Ukrainian military operations – rather than genocidal efforts to physically exterminate the Ukrainians as a national group. At present, there are few if any confirmed cases of Russian military forces wiping out entire towns or villages, or otherwise killing all Ukrainians in a given area of Russian occupation – the kind of violence we would expect to see in genocide. There are, however, two important caveats to make here. First, more evidence may emerge that would change this assessment. There is already fragmentary evidence of acts like, for example, systematically separating Ukrainian children from their families and deporting them to Russia, which could qualify as genocide under the 1948 Convention. In places, there have been reports of Russian targeting civilians purely on the basis that they spoke Ukrainian – this could also qualify as genocidal killing. As we learn more, it may become clearer that genocide is indeed occurring. It is also possible that individual acts of genocide may be occurring within broader patterns of violence against civilians that are not purely genocidal. Second, this assessment depends on a quite narrow, legal definition of genocide as expressed in the 1948 Genocide Convention. There is a broader sense in which some commentators are describing Russian actions in Ukraine as genocidal: not because the violence seeks to physically eliminate the Ukrainian people, but because Russia’s broader objectives in the war are to effectively deny Ukraine’s existence as an independent nation and destroy symbols and institutions of Ukrainian nationality. But this kind of ‘cultural genocide’ is generally seen as lying outside the Genocide Convention, and isn’t the same as seeking to physically destroy a group in the manner of the Holocaust, Armenian Genocide, Rwandan Genocide, or similar famous cases. If concepts like ‘urbicide’ – the destruction of cities – constitute genocide, moreover, then we would be forced to conclude that the British and American aerial bombing of Germany and Japan in World War II, which explicitly sought to destroy entire urban areas, was genocidal in nature. Few accept that verdict. Again, this is in no way to downplay the severity of Russian atrocities. Violence does not need to be genocidal to be abhorrent – and the international community has, since 2005, acknowledged a responsibility to prevent, react to and rebuild after atrocities, whether they are genocidal or not. As a scholar of genocide and mass atrocities, one of my principal fears is that people treat genocide as a kind of threshold of concern, below which violence can be effectively ignored. There is simply no reason why the genocidal killing of 8,000 Bosniaks by Serbian military forces at Srebrenica in July 1995 should concern us more than the non-genocidal killing of half a million alleged ‘communists’ in Indonesia in 1965-66, or the killing of over 1.5 million North Koreans through state-induced famine in the 1990s. So politicians and NGOs should pause before rushing to employ the language of genocide as a denunciatory device against Russia, when key evidence about the actual intent behind violence on the ground remains murky. Such language is not necessary, and reinforces the questionable message that only genocides, and not the wide range of other atrocity crimes, really matter. It can also distort understanding of the real character of atrocities taking place and could complicate later legal prosecutions. We would do better to strengthen the consensus that atrocity crimes, irrespective of their particular form, present an urgent humanitarian crisis demanding international attention and action. Comments are closed.
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