When Russian leader Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, many friends expressed their sympathies and asked about family in Ukraine. “Are they okay?” Not to worry, I tell them. I don’t have hardly any family in Ukraine. They were almost all killed in Russia’s earlier versions of the war it wages today. In the 1920s, a Soviet execution squad came for my grandfather because he owned a modest farm, a reason to be shot. He talked his way out of it by offering his clothes and mittens.
Dozens of other family members weren’t so lucky and were executed, their bodies dumped in a ravine. Another squad came for my grandfather a few years later. He escaped in his pyjamas on a cold winter night.
Holodomor killed 4-10 million Ukrainians
Other family members died in the Ukrainian genocide of 1932-33, which we call the Holodomor, or “famine extermination.” This was Stalin’s perpetration of a famine in Ukraine in order to snuff out Ukrainian nationhood and force peasants into collective farms. An estimated four to 10 million Ukrainians died.
“Famine in Ukraine was brought on to decrease the number of Ukrainians, replace the dead with people from other parts of the USSR and thereby to kill the slightest thought of any Ukrainian independence,” a Soviet secret police report said at the time.
My grandparents and aunt, then a young girl, survived. During World War Two, they and my mother, then 7, were forcibly sent to Nazi German slave labour camps. They survived that too and after the war immigrated to Canada.
War fits genocide criteria
The Soviet Union and Russia before it sought to erase Ukraine ever since Moscow’s occupation started in the 1600s. The Ukrainian language and culture were severely restricted. Ukrainians who spoke out were killed or sent to psychiatric facilities or Siberian labour camps. Ukraine’s very history was denied. Russia called Ukrainians “Little Russians” and said they were simply a subcategory of Russians.
Putin uses the same nation-deleting language. “Ukraine is not a real country,” he said in 2008. “Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians,” he said in a rambling speech just before launching his war. “Modern Ukraine” was an artificial invention of the Soviet Union, created by “severing what is historically Russian land.”
Putin’s vision is not only delusional. It is genocidal. The UN defines genocide as killing or seriously harming members of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, with the “intent to destroy” the group, in whole or in part. The definition is an exact fit for Putin’s actions and intent.
As many as 20,000 dead in Mariupol alone
As the Atlantic Council put it, “In order to create the russified Ukraine he dreams of, Putin will need to pacify or remove the vast majority of the population…. Given the scale and ferocity of popular opposition to the Russian invasion, any pacification campaign would need to rival the worst crimes against humanity of the totalitarian twentieth century.”
The war has already killed untold thousands of Ukrainian civilians, including as many as 20,000 in Mariupol alone, according to one official in the besieged city. Memories of Stalin’s genocide are being revived as starvation and dire food shortages are reported in Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities, such as Izium and Kherson.
“The poorer ones are already starting to starve,” a journalist in Kherson said in early March.
This Maxar satellite image taken March 19, 2022 and released March 21, 2022 shows burning apartment buildings, “likely shelled by artillery” according to Maxar, and burning buildings in north-eastern Mariupol, Ukraine. (Photo by Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies / AFP)
“Accusation in a mirror”—a genocide harbinger
It’s sometimes said that when Putin accuses others of doing something awful, he is projecting and thus reveals his own plans. In this way, Putin’s intent becomes clear in the accusations he makes against Ukrainians.
Putin claims that Ukrainians committed genocide against Russian speakers and that Ukrainians are led by Nazis. The absurd claims should not be roundly dismissed. They suggest that Putin himself has genocide and Hitler’s example in his mind.
This is what genocide scholars call “accusation in a mirror”—accusing a group of exactly the misdeeds that the genocide perpetrator schemes to commit. Researchers studying the missed warning signs of the Rwandan genocide said it’s a key way to identify a planned genocide.
Accusation in a mirror “has historically been an almost invariable harbinger of genocide,” they said, noting that it “has proven to be one of the central mechanisms” used to justify and incite genocide.
Ukrainians know what Putin has in mind. In one survey, 56 percent said they believe the war’s goal is “the complete destruction of the Ukrainian people.” Nearly 50 percent believe Putin’s plan is to occupy and annex Ukraine. (More than one answer was allowed.)
Sanctions nowhere near Iran, North Korea levels
Despite crucial help from around the world, Ukrainians need more support to stop Putin’s genocidal plans. The help so far has come in dribs and drabs, and at a woefully insufficient, half-hearted level.
Sanctions imposed on Russia are still nowhere near those slapped on Iran or North Korea, according to analysis by the Atlantic Council. Many of Putin’s crony tycoons remain unsanctioned, as are most senior Russian officials, many large Russian companies, Russian capital markets and major sectors of Russia’s economy.
European Union countries bought $16.6 billion of Russian energy in the first 25 days of the war, according to a website tracking the spending. The amount dwarfs by far the aid that those countries gave Ukraine. The Atlantic Council detailed seven additional layers of escalated sanctions that have yet to be applied to Russia.
Ukrainian soldiers still lack helmets and vests
Western military aid, while critical for Ukraine’s resistance, has also been heavily constrained. Ukrainian pleas for fighter planes and better air defense have run aground amid NATO buck-passing.
Many Ukrainian soldiers still lack even basic equipment, such as helmets, vests, medical kits, knee pads and batteries. Social media is full of pleas for donations of such rudimentary supplies.
The Washington Post reported on an elite Ukrainian sniper unit whose soldiers were so poorly equipped they spent their free time scouring the Internet to buy weapons. They paid with their own money. Ukrainians are crowdfunding their own survival.
Ukraine’s military budget less than NYPD’s
The limited military aid pledged so far has obviously been welcome. It helped Ukrainians fight one of the world’s largest armies to a standstill—even though Ukraine’s military budget ($4.6 billion in 2021) is smaller than the New York Police Department’s ($5.6 billion), while Russia spends $60 to $65 billion, over 10 times more.
But Putin, his blitzkrieg hopes dashed, has again telegraphed his genocidal intent by pivoting to mass murder of Ukrainians via bombing, shelling and a new Holodomor in Ukrainian cities.
Ramped-up help needed to stop genocide
Ukrainian forces will be hard pressed to stop Putin without ramped-up sanctions and aid, including planes, drones, electronic warfare, long-range air defense, artillery and counterfire systems.
Ukraine is defending itself from its second genocide hatched by Moscow in less than a century. Every day of waiting for more decisive help pushes the survival of Ukrainians further away.
‘Never again’ is now.
Alex Roslin is an award-winning Ukrainian-Canadian journalist and author who was president of the board of directors of the Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting. He tweets at @ArmedMaidan.
