Bringing Kremlin to international court

The US Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, recently announced a terrible figure at a UN Security Council session: 500 civilians killed in Debaltseve. They were killed on purpose, when there was no artillery fire. Their corpses were found in basements. After seizing Debaltseve, the Russian army began to “mop up” the city’s blocks. They were doing this in a classical way by throwing hand grenades into basements full of people. The perpetrators of this crime had no scruples about filming themselves and humiliatingly twisting the name of the Ukrainian city they occupied. They were boasting of what they had done. This behavior is not a novelty, for example, to Luhansk residents. Olena Stepova recalls some instances of the Russian military’s similar conduct in Luhansk oblast. I personally saw multiple rocket launchers send their infernal “greetings” from downtown Luhansk to the villages of Khriashchuvate and Novosvitlivka, razing them to the ground.

“There were fully-equipped Chechens at Luhansk checkpoints for a long time,” says Dmytro from Luhansk. “Nobody concealed that they came from Russia. In Kambrod (a part of Luhansk), when Metalist and Shchastia were being shelled, a Grad rocket launcher came to Artema St. After it had fired all its rockets on Shchastia and Metalist, another Grad came, turned around, and began to shell the city. The militants were not exactly hiding this. People could see this very well. Some attempts to ward this off ended up in tragedies. I once heard a militant in a file begin to speak Ukrainian or, to me more exact, the pidgin. Clearly, this guy was one of the locally recruited hirelings. The commander immediately reacted menacingly: “Who the hell is speaking this bloody tongue?” This is the characteristic attitude of a ringleader, who was evidently brought in to Ukraine, to a manifestation of Ukrainian identity. I can say that all ethnicities had peacefully coexisted in the Luhansk region before the gun-wielding Russians came. Their arrival abruptly changed this. All things Ukrainian began to be cruelly squeezed out.”

In addition to the horrible amateur video from Debaltseve, which resembled the footage of the Chechen villages the Russian army wiped out in the 1990s, television also showed the trailer of a Russian documentary with Putin’s interview. The Russian president openly admits that the occupation of Crimea was preplanned. After watching this trailer, Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arsenii Yatseniuk instructed the Ministry of Justice to draw up a lawsuit to The Hague court which we think should be Putin’s Nuremberg 1946. However, Nuremberg 1946 was preceded by Berlin 1945. But we can see so far that the Russian occupational troops are moving deeper inside the Ukrainian territory and, at the same time, hanging over our borders. Putin, who has flouted the international security system without caring a damn about basic international agreements, knows only too well that his statements only form a still larger number of his adepts. The impression is that the West believes that the dictator is not insane and is supposed to know where to halt. Unfortunately, this is the false logic of the world community which views the Donbas catastrophe from the angle of “appeasement,” trying not to notice terrible realities.

“The Russian bandits continue to kill local residents,” says Mykola Grekov, a Luhansk resident and an Aidar battalion fighter. “They shelled Luhansk from Oleksandrivsk and Yuvileiny. The bandits fired at Shchastia from near the monument to Prince Ihor in the village of Stanytsia Luhanska, then they turned around and fired at Luhansk itself to create an impression that it was a response from the Ukrainian side. I am not an ethnic Ukrainian, but I’m a citizen of this country. Unfortunately, the state has never defended itself in as far as information is concerned. Propaganda and information policy, a prompt and adequate reaction to realities have always been our weak point. We have forgotten that Petro Kalnyshevsky, the last kish otaman of the Zaporozhian army, made a great contribution to what is now Donbas. In 1775 Kalnyshevsky was exiled to Solovky. When he was the otaman, the Donbas was being populated with fugitives. What is going on now is not the first attempt to commit genocide against local residents. The same also occurred in the Soviet era. Ukraine should pay more attention to the Donbas, its history, and information of the populace – the latter should know who and where from they are, and what ignoring their own history will lead to. We must have a national idea based on statehood – a united Ukraine, a single language, a single church, and a single people.”

Putin is not fighting for the Donbas and Crimea. He does not want Ukraine to exist at all. It is his ulterior goal and perhaps a fixed idea to champion the cause of tsars to the end and, accordingly, to eliminate the one who is in fact the owner of Rus’ history, who really advanced the idea of social contracts and democratic elections, who has always striven for freedom. Putin’s goal is to finally solve the “Ukrainian problem” by means of feverish provocations, spy viruses, and annexation of territories as a result of direct intervention. Putin wants eastern and western Ukrainians to drown one another in the Dnipro. A former KGB man receives a particularly cynical “kick” when he manages to get a job down with somebody else’s hands and forces the victim to self-eliminate.

The enemy is marketing the idea (quite openly on TV) of the Ukrainian nation’s inferiority. He combines genocide with the formulas of ethnocide, i.e., elimination of self-identification. We are witnessing our own murder, and nobody but we will be able to explain this crime in scientific and legal terms. There is no guarantee that another James Mace will emerge 50 years later and tell our grandchildren how Muscovites threw grenades at their grandfathers who had an option of either to die or to become a “new Russian,” a “Soviet man,” or even just a Russian. The faith in the invincibility of the Ukrainian nation is a romantic necessity for raising the spirit, but ritual mantras and self-pleasing political slogans cannot convince the world and, what is more, our descendants. The memory of the latter will be the proof of invincibility.

“Since I was a child, I have seen a set of more and more intricate measures aimed at stifling the Ukrainian national idea in the Donbas,” lawyer Khrystyna Ochkur, a former Luhansk resident, comments to The Day. “This can be called nothing but genocide. It consists in the following: no understanding of and involvement in the Ukrainian people’s tragedies (first of all, this concerns the Holodomor); hatred for Ukrainian national heroes; absolute ignorance of Ukrainian history and literature (the majority hates Bandera but do not know who he was); absence of national traditions; absence of cultural life; disgust at the Ukrainian language whipped up in Donbas cities; the exclusive showing of Russian channels on cable television; absence of patriotic upbringing.”

Over the past year, the Ukrainian nation has seen not only a loss of its territories, but also a systemic extermination. The physical liquidation of Ukrainian people is a reality we have come to grips with: it all began with the killing of fishermen in the Sea of Azov, continued with the shooting of a Ukrainian warrant-officer by the Russians in Crimea, and ended with the death or injury of thousands of servicemen, volunteers, and Donbas local residents. The Ukrainians are being exterminated on a mass scale and methodically, with cynical coverage in the Russian mass media. The enemy presents the killing of a Ukrainian defender as elimination of a “fascist” and “occupier” and blames the victim for killing civilians. This clear and brazen formula was not invented yesterday. One can only counter this formula by taking advance steps, which is quite a problem for us. A systemic aggression can only be countered with systemic defense which involves not only military measures, but also forethought. So far, only the aggressor is capable of this – before each of his crimes, he begins to shout about “Ukraine’s aggression,” “genocide of the Russian-speaking population,” etc.

After all, the only weapon we have to keep ourselves from turning into a torn-away page in history 100 years later is a straightforward look at reality. In this case, a very topical question for us is how to record the facts of the violation of Ukrainian citizens’ rights. Are there any mechanisms to systemically record and legally qualify these facts, and is Ukraine going to file suits to international courts about the violation of Ukrainians’ rights and about crimes against humanity? Frankly speaking, this kind of suits should have been filed “the day before yesterday.”

COMMENTARY

“THIS IS ETHNOCIDE”

Stanislav KULCHYTSKY, Doctor of Sciences (History):

“This involves a number of problems that are difficult to think over. I would not use the term ‘genocide.’ Genocide is purposeful extermination of people for the sake of extermination. We saw this in 1932, this also happened to the Armenians. So, what is the name? It is, above all, a war. But we do not even dare call what is going on a war. This is ethnocide, the repudiation of a nation. Conditions are created when a nation renounces its ethnicity. The 1926 census asked about origin, not ethnicity. The point was where an individual came from rather than who he or she considered themselves to be. That census showed there were very many Ukrainians. But the 1939 census directly referred to ethnicity. Incidentally, in that census residents of Kuban called themselves Russians, not Ukrainians. A mere four percent were allowed to consider themselves Ukrainians.

“We are facing a broader problem. We have been under informational occupation for a very long time – the whole country, not only the Donbas. It is not only about the elimination of Ukrainians. The very word ‘Ukrainian’ has ceased to mean an ethnicity – it is something bigger than this. Russia is laying claim not only on the Ukrainian territory, it is not only trying to turn Ukrainians into Little Russians. It is laying claim to our entire historical memory. Russia is attaching great importance to the 1,000th anniversary of Prince Volodymyr the Great.

“They are also laying claim to Yaroslav the Wise and all the other Kyivan princes, to our history. But their history begins from the Golden Horde. Before this war, we did not entirely forget this (suffice it to recall Hrushevsky’s History of Ukraine-Rus’), but still we did not separate ourselves from the Russians. I once said in the early 1990s that Ukraine was beginning to crawl out of Russia. I cannot say this process has speeded up in the past 20 years. On the contrary, Russia has begun to purposefully push us back inside itself. Reading Internet comments, I can see how this cruelty and resentment has increased lately. On the other hand, this process is also positive, for it lets us, for the first time, feel ourselves true Ukrainians.”