Modern Genocide of Ukrainians through the Prism of Raphael Lemkin’s Consept of soviet Genocide
Authors: KOSTIV Mykhailo 
Published: November 2024

In his speech delivered in New York in 1953, the famous international lawyer, the author of the term “genocide”, Raphael Lemkin proposed his own vision of the policy of the USSR towards Ukrainians as genocide. He believed that not only the extermination of Ukrainians by famine in 1932–1933 should be seemed as genocide, but also more broadly all actions of the Kremlin aimed at the Russification of the Ukrainian nation. The lawyer spoke of four “strikes”, “prongs” of the attack on the Ukrainian nation. Even after Ukraine became independent in 1991, the Russian pressure directed against the Ukrainian statehood continued. The events escalated in 2014 with the occupation of Crimea and Russian invasion to the Donetsk and Luhansk region. The purpose of the repressive measures the pro-Kremlin forces (such as physical attacks against active people, exclusion of the Ukrainian language from all spheres of social life, etc.) took on the occupied territories was to break the “spine” of the Ukrainian resistance there. Importantly, R. Lemkin’s concept can also be applied to the events of the Russian-Ukrainian fullscale war, which has been ongoing since February 24, 2022 and which many countries of the world have already recognized as genocidal. At the same time, the scholarly discussions about the genocidal nature of this war and ways of using of this term in international law and politics are ongoing. In particular, the Russian occupiers destroy the “brain of the nation”. They kidnap, imprison and kill Ukrainian intellectuals, journalists and writers, confiscate Ukrainian-language books from libraries as “Nazi literature” and burn them down, and deny children access to education in the Ukrainian language. The invaders are also attacking the “soul of the nation”, destroying churches and repressing the clergy of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Instead, the Kremlin uses the Russian Orthodox Church under its control to popularize anti-Ukrainian ideas among the general public. The occupiers are also massively destroying the “body of the nation” – the population of the occupied territories, “average Ukrainians”. This happens due to the killing of civilians, physical, psychological and sexual violence against them, creation of conditions incompatible with life (humanitarian disasters) on the temporarily occupied territories, systematic shelling and destruction of critical infrastructure, etc. In addition, we should mention the confiscation of crops from Ukrainian farmers, which is reminiscent of the actions of the Bolsheviks during the Holodomor. Finally, the enemy fragments the Ukrainian nation by Russifying and deporting the inhabitants of the temporarily occupied territories, including children, to Russia and populating the captured Ukrainian lands, cities and towns with representatives of other nations. Therefore, the analysis of current events through the prism of R. Lemkin’s concept reveals the tenacity of the Russian misanthropic policy towards the Ukrainian nation and Moscow’s boundless imperial ambitions. In particular, the actions of Russian troops in the occupied territories (systematic violence, repression, attack on the Ukrainian language and culture, encroachment on religious freedoms, forced deportations, etc.) pose a serious threat to the Ukrainian identity of the residents and lead to theRussification of the temporarily occupied territories. As in the times of the USSR, the current leadership of the Kremlin manipulates information, hiding its crimes from the world and using propaganda to create a positive image of the government among the population. Putin’s regime already objects to comparing the events of a full-scale war with the Holodomor, and this tendency is probably going to increase in the future. In conclusion, our approach also demonstrates a certain universality of R. Lemkin’s ideas regarding the actions of the Kremlin against enslaved nations. Keywords: genocide, Holodomor, Raphael Lemkin, Russian-Ukrainian war, crime, Ukrainian nation.