It is now increasingly clear that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a war of genocide. Mounted with genocidal intent, pursued with determined genocidal effort, the war is an assault not only on Ukrainians and Ukrainian nationhood, but the idea of Ukrainian-ness itself.
It has involved the wholesale killing and mass rape of Ukrainians. And, with increasing obviousness, the war has involved the mass theft of Ukrainian children by Russia — an act of forced population transfer that meets the definition of genocide according to the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Late last year, the Washington Post reported details of a Russian plan to ship Ukrainian children out of their home country, to give them new Russian families and Russian identities, and in doing so to destroy the Ukrainian nation one child at a time.
The numbers are vast and difficult to confirm. But the stories are now being widely reported across Ukrainian areas occupied at any time in the past year by Russia. Most horrifically of all, orphaned Ukrainian children whose parents were killed during the country’s invasion have been scooped up by Russian troops, sent to Russia and told they are little Russians — and that they were never Ukrainian at all.
This is part of a larger cultural understanding of Russia’s genocidal war: the children can be taken and told they are Russian because, in the Russian official mind, Ukraine does not exist, never existed, and must therefore be stricken from history.
In a report on the legal aspects of Russia’s genocide, co-published by the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in May last year, the authors were careful to attend to the cultural aspects of genocide. Russia’s actions in the occupied territories have been a clear indication of its genocidal ambitions.
As the report states, “High-level Russian officials have repeatedly denied the existence of Ukrainian language, culture and national identity, implying instead that those who identify as distinctly Ukrainian threaten the ‘unity’ of Russians and Ukrainians.”
This tendency in Russian official circles never went away after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But it was kicked into high gear by the 2014 annexation of Crimea and start of the war in the Donbas. Russian state media and Russian state-affiliated think tanks published a continuous stream of pieces and reports based on the idea of Russian and Ukrainian “brotherhood” (with Ukraine subordinate) and interchangeability.
The Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS), a Russian government think tank that (its mission statement claims) informs national security policy, has opinions on the “national question”. In 2014, after the seizure of Crimea and parts of the Donbas, RISS published a collection of essays called “Ukraine Is Russia”, which was dedicated “to the unity of the Russian world”. The collection includes a contribution that describes the idea of “Ukrainian-ness” as “a peculiar South Russian regional Westernism” — contorted phrasing for an ugly assertion: that Ukrainians who consider themselves Ukrainian are mentally ill, or corrupted by foreign influence.
The desire to deny the very existence of Ukrainian culture was strong. In March 2016, a RISS analyst, Oleg Nemensky, argued that “the majority of the Ukrainian public have nothing to do with that [Ukrainian] culture”. Only Russian culture exists, in this worldview, and therefore the Ukrainian population can have no interaction with the culture that is claimed to be theirs.
All of this impacted the very top. When President Vladimir Putin published his now infamous essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” in July 2021, he made it clear what he thought: that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people, a single whole”.
In his essay, Putin wrote that “modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era” and that “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia”. He also slid into the conspiracy theories that he used to justify his invasion the following year: that when the Ukrainian government and people reject these characterisations and maintain their own independence and cultural integrity, they are not a separate people but neo-Nazis.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, its forces wasted no time in beginning to suppress aspects of Ukrainian culture. Billboards featuring the national poet Taras Shevchenko were torn down or covered up. City signs proclaiming the names of towns in Ukrainian were replaced with the Russified version of those names. Where they were previously painted in blue and white, the colours of Ukraine’s flag, the same signs were daubed with the Russian tricolour.
In Putin’s deranged speech to mark the nominal annexation of four regions (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia) into Russia proper, he returned to the genocidal themes that have dominated his regime and its policies for the past eight years. “[T]here is nothing stronger,” he said, “than the determination of millions of people who, by their culture, religion, traditions and language, consider themselves part of Russia, whose ancestors lived in a single country for centuries. There is nothing stronger than their determination to return to their true historical homeland.”
After false referendums, conducted under military occupation and in territories from which the Russian military is now retreating, these people are no longer Ukrainians. In Moscow’s eyes, they are Russians, and those who say otherwise are Nazis, or insane.
The full catalogue of Russian atrocities against the Ukrainian populations in towns and cities it has occupied is yet to be told. Until Mariupol is opened to international investigation, we will never know what went on there. The full numbers of Ukrainian children stolen by the Russian occupiers may never be known. The longer they remain in Russian custody, being reeducated by Russian schools, given new Russian parents and Russian names, the more their connection to Ukraine weakens — as is intended by Russia’s genocidal policy.
It is towns occupied by Russia, and subsequently liberated, from which we have testimony of witnesses who describe how Putin’s doctrine of Ukrainian and Russian “brotherhood” is put into practice.
Men with Ukrainian-themed tattoos are executed. Teachers say they were tortured by Russian occupiers for trying to teach in their own language rather than Russian. Across the annexed regions, similar treatment is at hand for those who still believe themselves to be Ukrainians living in Ukraine, with a right to hold dear and to express their own language and culture and history.
That a Ukrainian conductor was murdered by Russian soldiers last October for refusing to participate in a concert for the occupiers of Kherson makes this point all the starker.
Ukraine’s repudiation of annexation by military victory is not enough. As time goes on, the nature of this genocidal war has not changed. Even if all of Ukraine were to be recaptured, elite Russian opinion would likely not alter.
Surmounting this all is the theft of children. Even months ago, it was determined that Russia had kidnapped possibly as many as hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children and deported them to Russia. Their new adoptive parents, and Russian passports, are the tools of genocide: it is genocide that they are slowly taught to hate and despise their former country.
This theft and reeducation of children will continue to be an act of genocide long after the last Russian invader has left Ukrainian soil. Russia’s mere defeat will not uproot the cultural narrative that led to this genocide from its entrenched and hallowed place in Russian national life; and it will not, on its own, return Ukraine’s stolen children.
Russia’s motivation is both genocidal and grimly practical. Its population is aging dramatically. It has thrown away tens of thousands of young male lives in Ukraine, and more in the emigration of its most mobile and future-looking citizenry when the first mobilisation was threatened. Putin, an old man in a hurry, needs fresh blood for his dying country. And stealing Ukraine’s children in a textbook act of genocide appears to be his policy to achieve the transplant.
Just as surely as Ukraine must win the war, it must avert this genocidal theft of its young.
This is grim, but not unexpected. Russia sees Ukraine as a resource, and that includes its people. By the weird, closed logic bubble that is Putin’s Russia, no contradictions are to be mentioned, no alternatives given air, and no dissent tolerated. They probably see themselves as saving Ukraine’s kids.
I agree, but still wonder if Australia is the right country to point the finger and get righteous about stealing children for the purpose of cultural assimilation.
Australia’s experience probably makes it an ideal country to comprehend what is happening, as would that of many other former imperial or colonial states.
Maybe. Today’s Guardian has a report about a tribute to ‘Yorta Yorta elder William Cooper [who] led a group of Australian First Nations activists, the Australian Aborigines’ League, on a two-hour march from Footscray to the German consulate on Collins Street. The wave of violence known as Kristallnacht had swept across Nazi Germany a month earlier and Cooper’s group planned to register their “strong protest at the cruel persecution of the Jewish people”.’ Indigenous Australians protesting now against Russia’s conduct would be equally powerful.
Maybe. Today’s Guardian has a report about a tribute to ‘Yorta Yorta elder William Cooper [who] led a group of Australian First Nations activists, the Australian Aborigines’ League, on a two-hour march from Footscray to the German consulate on Collins Street. The wave of violence known as Kristallnacht had swept across [ModBot unacceptable word removed] Germany a month earlier and Cooper’s group planned to register their “strong protest at the cruel persecution of the Jewish people”.’ Indigenous Australians protesting now against Russia’s conduct would be equally powerful.
That practice is now condemned in Australia.
But nor yet rectifies
Rectified
Who should point the finger at obvious crimes, then? Not Australia because it once stole children. Not the US because it once made slaves of children? Not China because of its ‘one-child-policy’. Not the UK because its cotton industry once crushed children in looms to satisfy owners’ greed.
Who should point the finger? Nobody? Is that the point?
You have no reason to generalise from my specific point about stealing children to suggest this disqualifies anyone speaking about any crime at all; and if you’d bothered to read my reply to Bruce Hassan you’d have seen there is at least one good answer.
Fair call, Sinking. Apologies.
Correction: the Ukrainian flag is blue and yellow, not blue and white
A research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College, and a director at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington, D.C.
All we need to know. Another non independent propaganda article published by Crikey.
“Does the writer mean . . . ”
I would imagine the meaning the writer wishes to convey can be found more in the words they actually wrote rather than in the words they did not write but that you wish they had written.
Yeah, it’s all fake news, innit? Especially if it’s stuff you’d rather wasn’t written.
This sounds very much like propaganda. “Not confirmed?”
I would like to see actual data rather than a piece like this.
When the article states something is not confirmed it sounds unlike propaganda. Propaganda is far more likely to dress up its self-serving speculations and lies as matters of certainty.
No doubt everyone would like copious amounts of fully corroborated data replete with authoritative cross-checked references, but it seems there’s a war on…