Ukraine, Russia, and genocide of minor differences

Abstract

What’s worse, malice or mismanagement? The correct answer is, a mismanaged malice. Though Russian commanders badly mismanaged the military aspects of the Russo-Ukrainian war (2014–?), its genocidal aspects were preplanned and intentional. 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. This is exactly what Lemkin in 1933 called barbarity and vandalism, and renamed this combination into genocide in 1944. Since then, world leaders debate their pertinent issues, using Lemkin’s term. For this war, Putin and Zelenskyy had started such a debate, Biden and Macron have continued it, and we will see much more. Broadcasting and reading the word “genocide” almost daily, the global public is reconsidering its implications. Could a genocide happen, in the modern world, without punishment? But if it does go unpunished, would this not change our deepest intuitions about evil, justice, retribution, and genocide? Do we think about genocide deontologically, as a thing with certain features, or consequentially, as an action that was, or should be, properly punished so that it would occur “never again”? Is it the time to reimagine genocide as a serial event, or maybe a part of mega-events, which change their forms and flags but are threatening of repetition? Will the genocide remain unpunished and therefore stay with us, always ready to return, or will the very absence of punishment lead to a redefinition of the concept? This unimaginable and unmanageable but recurrent crime – is it really a genocide?