Putin’s Ukrainian Genocide

If you listen to chatter of the pundits and politicians, there seems to a debate about whether Russia is engaging in genocide in Ukraine.

Obviously, we aren’t experts in international law. So we looked up the defiition of genocide according to the Genocide Convention, which came together in the aftermath of WWII.

Genocide is defined as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group:

— Killing members of the group;

— Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; or

— Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

Putin is perpetrating all of these acts upon the people of Ukraine. From the outset of the invasion, he said that Ukraine “is not even a country” and that Russia needed to “de-Nazify” it — codewords for obliterating Ukraine and its people.

Russian forces are indiscriminately bombing, murdering, torturing, starving, and raping civilians. Russian forces have herded hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens onto trains and forcibly transported them to central Russia, where they await an uncertain fate.

The ceaseless bombing campaign against non-military targets has the only goal of wiping Ukrainian cities and towns from the face of the earth. Russian soldiers even have been going into libraries and destroying any books written in the Ukrainian language.

In short, Vladimir Putin is the 21st century equivalent of Hitler and Stalin, both of whom were genocidal sociopaths.

We hope and pray that our government and the rest of the civilized world will do everything conceivable to stop Putin’s barbarous genocide of the Ukrainian people.