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Notes
1 Allegations of war crimes have been under investigation by the International Criminal Court since March 2022; see Catherine Gegout, “The ICC is Investigating War Crimes in Ukraine – Could Putin be Indicted?,” The Conversation, 7 March 2022; United Nations, A/77/533: Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine – Note by the Secretary-General, 18 October 2022; Office of the Prosecutor General, Ukraine, https://warcrimes.gov.ua/en/ (accessed 4 January 2022); Iryna Marchuk, “Domestic Accountability Efforts in Response to the Russia – Ukraine War: An Appraisal of the First War Crimes Trials in Ukraine,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 20, no. 4 (2022): 787–803.
2 Sam Woolfson, “‘It's a Slam Dunk’: Philippe Sands on the Case Against Putin for the Crime of Aggression,” The Guardian, 31 March 2022; James A. Green et al., “Russia's Attack on Ukraine and the Jus ad Bellum,” Journal on the Use of Force and International Law 9, no. 1 (2022): 4–30; Claus Kreß, The Ukraine War and the Prohibition of the Use of Force in International Law (Brussels: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2022); Kevin Jon Heller, “Options for Prosecuting Russian Aggression Against Ukraine: A Critical Analysis,” Journal of Genocide Research (6 July 2022), doi:10.1080/14623528.2022.2095094.
3 Shpend Kursani, “Beyond Putin's Analogies: The Genocide Debate on Ukraine and the Balkan Analogy Worth Noting,” Journal of Genocide Research (11 July 2022): 4–5, doi:10.1080/14623528.2022.2099633.
4 Derek Saul, “Zelensky Accuses Russia of Genocide as Allegations of Civilian Killings Mount,” Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/04/03/zelensky-accuses-russia-of-genocide-as-allegations-of-civilian-killings-mount/?sh=bb5e71038cd7; “Ukraine's Zelensky accuses Russia of ‘genocide’ in Donbas Onslaught,” France 24, https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220527-ukraine-s-zelensky-accuses-russia-of-genocide-in-donbas-onslaught (both accessed 12 December 2022). For the international reaction, see Kursani, “Beyond Putin's Analogies,” 5–7.
5 Clint Williamson quoted by Ashish Kumar Sen, “Is Russia Committing Genocide in Ukraine?,” United States Institute of Peace, 21 September 2022.
6 “Ukraine War: Kyiv Likens Russian ‘Genocidal’ Tactics to Soviet-Era ‘Holodomor’ Famine,” Ukrainska Pravda, 26 November 2022, https://news.yahoo.com/russias-genocidal-war-against-ukraine-074704897.html? (accessed 12 December 2022).
7 International Court of Justice, Allegations of Genocide Under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Order), 16 March 2022; Iryna Marchuk and Aloka Wanigasuriya, “Beyond the False Claim of Genocide: Preliminary Reflections on Ukraine's Prospects in Its Pursuit of Justice at the ICJ,” Journal of Genocide Research (9 November 2022), doi:10.1080/14623528.2022.2143528. As Kursani, “Beyond Putin's Analogies,” shows, in February–March 2022 this issue was the original focus of debate about “genocide” in the war, which was then superseded by debate about Russia's actions. The exclusion of a detailed consideration of Ukraine's campaign from the present article is based on the assumption that there is no serious case that it has committed genocide against Russians or Russian speakers. This does not imply, of course, that questions about war crimes in the Ukrainian campaign are excluded.
8 Vladimir Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” 12 July 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181 (accessed 12 December 2022); Luke Harding, Invasion: Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival (London: Guardian Faber, 2022), 23–9; Ian Garner, ‘‘We’ve Got to Kill Them’: Responses to Bucha on Russian Social Media Groups,” Journal of Genocide Research (9 May 2022), doi:10.1080/14623528.2022.2074020, provides evidence of how social media actors amplify this genocidal mentality within Russian culture.
9 Timothy Snyder, “Russia Intends to Commit Genocide in Ukraine, Six Ways to Prove It,” European Pravda, 23 October 2022, https://www.eurointegration.com.ua/eng/articles/2022/10/23/7149219/index.amp (accessed 19 December 2022).
10 Denis Azarov, Dmytro Koval, Gaiane Nuridzhanian, and Volodymyr Venher, “Genocide Committed by the Russian Federation in Ukraine: Legal Reasoning and Historical Context,” SSN Papers (15 September 2022), doi:10.2139/ssrn.4217444.
11 Irwin Cotler, “Russia is in Standing Breach of the Genocide Convention,” Swissinfo, 31 January 2023, https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/irwin-cotler—russia-is-in-standing-breach-of-the-genocide-convention-/48228836 (accessed 13 February 2023).
12 Noëlle Quénivet, “The Conflict in Ukraine and Genocide,” Journal of International Peacekeeping 25, no. 2 (2022): 141–54; William A. Schabas, “Genocide and Ukraine: Do Words Mean What We Choose them to Mean?,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 20, no. 4 (2022): 843–57.
13 Quénivet, “The Conflict in Ukraine,” 153.
14 Schabas, “Genocide and Ukraine,” 15.
15 Ibid., 14, 15.
16 Philippe Sands, “What the Inventor of the Word ‘Genocide’ Might Have Said About Putin's War,” New York Times, 28 April 2022.
17 A. Dirk Moses, “The Ukraine Genocide Debate Reveals the Limits of International Law,” Lawfare, 16 May 2022. https://www.lawfareblog.com/ukraine-genocide-debate-reveals-limits-international-law (accessed 1 January 2023).
18 Moses, “The Ukraine Genocide Debate.” Moses has developed his argument about “rethinking the obsession” with genocide in The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). I address his arguments on this point in a forthcoming article.
19 Mälksoo argues that the war
is a moment revealing the distinctly Eurocentric character of theorizing in International Relations (IR) when it comes to the discipline's relative ignorance of Eastern European insights and the validity of their experiences throughout IR's formal existence since the aftermath of the First World War
20 International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro), Judgment (2007). Although Bosnia-Herzegovina originally brought its case against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, by the time it was adjudicated the latter had ceased to exist; the successor union-state of Serbia and Montenegro then became the respondent in the case, but Montenegro seceded from the union in 2006 and Serbia was the only respondent in 2007.
21 Quénivet, “The Conflict in Ukraine,” 151.
22 The Court's judgement was not unanimous. In particular its Vice-President, Judge Awn Shawkat Al-Khasawneh, entered a dissenting judgement contending that the majority, in refusing to infer genocide from the Serbians’ “consistent pattern of conduct” was “disregarding in this respect a rich and relevant jurisprudence of other courts” (International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro) – Judgment: Dissenting Opinion of Vice-President Al-Khasawneh, 2007.)
23 Quénivet, “The Conflict in Ukraine,” 151–2.
24 The Serbian nationalist forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina initially comprised elements of the Yugoslav National Army together with paramilitary groups under the control of Belgrade, as well as local Bosnians, but these mutated over the four years of the war as the Bosnian-Serbian statelet and army became more autonomous.
25 Gerard Toal and Carl T. Dahlman, Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 113.
26 International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro), Judgment (2007), 123.
27 Toal and Dahlman, Bosnia Remade, 293–320, show indeed that displaced people were generally unable to return to areas in which “their” ethnic group was a minority in the local postwar administration, including in Bosniak – and Croatian – as well as Serbian-controlled municipalities.
28 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), 81.
29 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and the Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
30 Martin Shaw, What is Genocide?, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 19–22, 50–2.
31 Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 3.
32 Lemkin described these techniques as political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious, and moral (Axis Rule, xi–xii).
33 Moses, The Problems of Genocide, 34–43.
34 International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro), Judgment (2007), 5.
35 The idea of “special” intent, long criticized by social-scientific writers, is now increasingly controversial among legal scholars too: see the discussion in Kai Ambos, “What Does ‘Intent to Destroy’ in Genocide Mean?,” International Review of the Red Cross 91, no. 876 (2010): 833–58, doi:10.1017/S1816383110000056.
36 Schabas, “Genocide and Ukraine,” 8.
37 Ibid.
38 Kai Ambos, “Karadzic's Genocidal Intent as the ‘Only Reasonable Inference’?,” EJIL: Talk! Blog of the European Journal of International Law, 1 April 2016.
39 Sands, “What the Inventor.”
40 Valentino, Final Solutions, 3; Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 7.
41 Alexander Etkind, “Ukraine, Russia, and Genocide of Minor Differences,” Journal of Genocide Research (7 June 2022): 1, doi:10.1080/14623528.2022.2082911. Etkind explains that “Russian actions in Ukrainian cities and villages included mass murders and deportations combined with intentional destruction of their cultural sites (monuments, museums, theatres, and so on), educational facilities, and history textbooks.”
42 Dominique Arel and Jesse Driscoll, Ukraine's Unnamed War: Before the Invasion of 2022 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 38.
43 Arel and Driscoll, Ukraine's Unnamed War, 100, 150.
44 Harding, Invasion, 307.
45 Nataliya Bugayova, “Target Russia's Capability, Not Its Intent,” 2022, https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/target-russia%E2%80%99s-capability-not-its-intent (accessed 30 December 2022).
46 Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, 7.
47 Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr V. Danylyuk, and Nick Reynolds, Preliminary Lessons in Conventional Warfighting from Russia's Invasion of Ukraine: February–July 2022 (London: Royal United Services Institute, 2022), 10.
48 The former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett claims that Putin told him in October 2022: “I won't kill Zelensky.” This denial, at a stage when a killing during the capture of Kyiv was no longer an option, actually testifies to how seriously the plan to murder Ukrainian leaders was taken internationally. Bethan McKernan, “Putin Promised Me He Would Not Kill Zelenskiy, Says Former Israeli PM,” The Guardian, 5 February 2023.
49 Zabrodskyi et al., Preliminary Lessons, 10–11.
50 Dara Massicot, “What Russian Got Wrong: Can Moscow Learn From Its Failures in Ukraine?,” Foreign Affairs, February–March 2023.
51 Anne Applebaum, Red Famine, Stalin's War on Ukraine (London: Penguin, 2017).
52 Genocide is “a form of one-sided mass killing,” according to Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 23, and “the mass killing of substantial numbers of human beings” according to Israel W. Charny, “Toward a Generic Definition of Genocide,” in Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, ed. George A. Andreopoulos (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 75.
53 Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr, “Toward Empirical Theory of Genocides and Politicides: Identification and Measurement of Cases Since 1945,” International Studies Quarterly 32, no. 3 (1988): 359–71.
54 Arel and Driscoll, Ukraine's Unnamed War, 37.
55 Ibid., 19.
56 See also Maria Domańska, “Medvedev Escalates Anti-Ukrainian Rhetoric,” 5 April 2022, https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2022-04-05/medvedev-escalates-anti-ukrainian-rhetoric (accessed 3 February 2023). Gubarev's remarks are quoted by Snyder, “Russia Intends to Commit Genocide.”
57 Snyder, “Russia Intends to Commit Genocide.”
58 Moses, The Problems of Genocide.
59 Lawrence Freedman, “Putin's Massive Mistake: Lawrence Freedman on Ukraine and the Lessons of History,” (interview) Salon, 21 November 2022.
60 Harding, Invasion, 217; Samantha Lock, “US Estimates 200,000 Military Casualties on All Sides in Ukraine War,” The Guardian, 10 November 2022; Julian Borger, “‘It Has Been Machine Guns Lately’: Fighting Intensifies in Southern Kherson,” The Guardian, 9 December 2022.
61 Harding, Invasion, 294, 223.
62 Freedman, “Putin's Massive Mistake.”
63 Eric Markusen and David Kopf, The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and Total War in the Twentieth Century (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995).
64 Moses, The Problems of Genocide, 37–42, 243–394.
65 Anthony Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: Is the Targeting of Civilians in War Ever Justified? (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 158–63. Even half a century later, Grayling reminds us, this group conception was echoed in Daniel Goldhagen's influential ideas of the “flawed national character” and “collective guilt” of Germans (166).
66 Martin Shaw, War and Genocide (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 23–6, 34–53.
67 Martin Shaw, “The General Hybridity of War and Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 9, no. 3 (2006): 461–73.
68 Jamie Dettmer, “Klitschko's Big Fight: Keeping 3 Million People in Kyiv Over Winter,” 21 November 2022, https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-russia-war-vitali-klitschko-is-ready-for-the-bout-of-his-life/ (accessed 4 January 2023).
69 Human Rights Watch, Ukraine: Russian Forces Tortured Izium Detainees, 19 October 2022, https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/10/19/ukraine-russian-forces-tortured-izium-detainees (accessed 19 December 2022).
70 Human Rights Watch, “We Had No Choice”: “Filtration” and the Crime of Forcibly Transferring Ukrainian Civilians to Russia, Human Rights Watch, 1 September 2022, https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/09/01/we-had-no-choice/filtration-and-crime-forcibly-transferring-ukrainian-civilians (accessed 19 December 2022); Conflict Observatory, Russia's Systematic Program for the Re-education and Adoption of Ukraine's Children, 14 February 2023, https://hub.conflictobservatory.org/portal/apps/sites/#/home/pages/children-camps-1 (accessed 20 February 2023).
71 Azarov et al., “Genocide Committed,” 30; for a survey, Liesl Gerntholtz, Ukrainian Culture Under Attack: Erasure of Ukrainian Culture in Russia's War Against Ukraine (New York: PEN America, 2022).
72 In Bosnia-Herzegovina, as we have seen, despite the promotion of return by the international authorities after the war, relatively few “minority” returns occurred. In Palestine in 1948, most of the Arab population fled in the face of fighting and Zionist terror; after the war Israel refused to let the majority return, turning temporary plight into permanent displacement and the erasure of most of the existing Palestinian society.
73 Amnesty International, “I Used to Have a Home”: Older People’s Experience of War, Displacement, and Access to Housing in Ukraine, 6 December 2022, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur50/6250/2022/en/ (accessed 19 December 2022).
74 Lemkin, Axis Rule, xi.
75 Azarov et al., “Genocide Committed,” 38–42.
76 Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Ukraine: Civilian Casualty Update 5 December 2022,” 5 December 2022; “Mariupol: Civilian Death Toll in Region May Be Higher Than Estimated 22K, Says Official,” Republic World, https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/russia-ukraine-crisis/mariupol-civilian-death-toll-in-region-may-be-higher-than-estimated-22k-says-official-articleshow.html (accessed 9 December 2022). A detailed assessment of Mariupol by Associated Press journalists suggests that the death toll could even have been substantially higher: Lori Hinnant, Vsilisa Stepanenko, Sarha El Deeb, and Elizaveta Tilna, “Russian Scrubs Mariupol's Ukraine Identity, Builds on Death,” AP News, 23 December 2022, https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-erasing-mariupol-499dceae43ed77f2ebfe750ea99b9ad9 (accessed 11 February 2023). Caution is needed in dealing with casualty figures, which are easily inflated due to uncertain information; in the Bosnian war, early claims of over 200,000 deaths were eventually replaced by estimates of overall deaths, civilian and military, of around the 100,000 level. Yet even if some figures are inflated, it seems highly probable that the Bosnian total has been exceeded in Ukraine in just one year.
77 Veronika Melkozerova, “Ukraine Unplugged: How Ukrainian Citizens Persevere in the Darkness,” The Atlantic, 25 December 2022.
78 Vlad Mykhnenko, “Causes and Consequences of the War in Eastern Ukraine: An Economic Geography Perspective,” Europe-Asia Studies 72, no. 3 (2020), 528–60.
79 Ukraine is not exceptional in this respect; in most genocide situations, the perpetrators aim to destroy social infrastructure and/or expel the population, with sufficient killing to achieve these aims, rather than to physically exterminate the majority or all of the enemy group.
80 “One-sidedness” is seen as a defining feature of genocide by writers Chalk and Jonassohn (The History and Sociology of Genocide), and Charny (“Toward a Generic Definition”). For a further explanation of the perspective presented here, see Shaw, What is Genocide?, 146–68.
81 Schabas, “Genocide and Ukraine,” 14–15.
82 Moses, “The Ukraine Genocide Debate.”
83 For an analytical survey, Martin Shaw, Genocide and International Relations: Changing Patterns in the Transitions of the Late Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
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Martin Shaw
Martin Shaw is research professor at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals and emeritus professor of international relations and politics at the University of Sussex. His research interests lie in the social theory and historical sociology of war, genocide, and global politics.