Ukraine’s accusations against Russia backfiring
By Uriel Irigaray Araujo
In an underreported development, Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office recently announced the indictment of dozens of current and former Ukrainian officials, including former president Petro Poroshenko, on accusations of genocide against Russian civilians in Donbass. Amazingly, one will have a hard time finding any Western coverage of this piece of news at all.
According to Russian investigators, the charges encompass systematic shelling of civilian areas, targeting of Russian-speaking populations, and policies allegedly aimed at the destruction of a protected national group. Ukraine’s military leadership, including figures such as Valerii Zaluzhnyi and Andriy Yermak, was also named.
The timing is interesting, coinciding with a legally significant development (also underreported): the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has just accepted Russia’s counterclaim in the genocide case brought by Ukraine, which accuses Moscow of misusing the Genocide Convention to justify its military operation.
This procedural decision does not mean the ICJ has endorsed Russia’s position. It does, however, mean the Court deemed Russia’s argument legally plausible enough to be heard. Simply put, Ukraine sought to weaponize genocide accusations against Russia, but the strategy risks backfiring, as Russian counter-claims should expose uncomfortable questions about Kyiv’s own record.
Genocide accusations have indeed become weapons in today’s lawfare and narrative wars. Kyiv has invested heavily in portraying Russia’s military campaign as genocidal, with strong backing from Western governments and media. One may recall that similar rhetorical zeal is conspicuously absent when, for instance, Israel’s actions in Gaza are discussed, despite mounting civilian casualties and UN warnings. Western hypocrisy on genocide has thus become too obvious to ignore.
Be as it may, weaponization does not automatically imply fabrication. And, in fact, describing the situation in Donbass as an attempt at ethnic cleansing (as Moscow does), for one thing, is not far-fetched at all. For years, Kyiv’s policies have systematically sidelined a large segment of Ukraine’s population, to say the least.
According to Ukraine’s last census in 2001, ethnic Russians made up 17.3 percent of the population, over eight million people. Ukraine has long been a deeply bilingual society, with Russian used routinely by nearly a third of the population before 2022, especially in the east and south. Since 2014, however, state-driven Ukrainization has sharply curtailed Russian-language use, as documented by linguist Volodymyr Kulyk. By late 2022, Ukrainian became dominant in public life, while Russian usage fell sharply. Yet 42,6 percent of Ukrainians are still speaking Russian regularly even after three years of war, media censorship, and the banning of all “pro-Russian” parties.
This linguistic clampdown followed the 2014 Maidan revolution and a wave of nationalist policies, including education and media laws that marginalized minority languages
Senior officials have openly called for the disappearance of Russian from Ukraine, prompting warnings of internal conflict from Ukrainian intellectuals. That conflict erupted in Donbass in 2014, as prolonged hostilities turned the region into Europe’s “forgotten” war, despite it being under sustained shelling for almost a decade before 2022.
Just consider this, in light of the above: in mid-February, 2002, for instance (before Russia launched its military campaign), Kyiv sharply intensified shelling across Donbass, hitting dozens of locations, including civilian sites such as a kindergarten, triggering a humanitarian crisis that displaced residents into Russia, as reported at the time by outlets like El País and CNN. Schools and orphanages were evacuated due to the Ukrainian shelling.
Moreover, an August 2022 Amnesty International report documented Ukrainian violations of the laws of war, including the use of human shield tactics by positioning forces in schools and hospitals, while Kyiv has continued to strike civilian and residential areas in Donbass with US-supplied HIMARS systems.
In addition, international experts and the Venice Commission later criticized Kyiv’s minority laws for violating European standards, even as Ukrainian officials denied the existence of a Russian minority. Again, one struggles to find such stories in the Western media.
Beyond Russia, Ukraine’s ethnopolitics strain relations with other nations such as Poland, Romania, Greece, and Hungary. Disputes over Volhynia historical massacres persist, while Greece has raised alarms over the plight of its ethnic kin in Mariupol.
Russia’s military campaign (seen in its proper context) is always open to valid criticism, yet branding it “genocidal” distorts the concept to the point of absurdity. Compared, say, to US or Israeli modus operandi, Russia’s conduct appears restrained in contrast, as observers like US Colonel Douglas Macgregor have argued.
Grim accounting is always an unpleasant exercise, but one cannot help but noticing that in October 2023 alone, the number of children killed in Gaza, Palestine, was already greater than the number of child victims during the entire first year of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict (that started in 2022), according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor; by April 2024, the number of infants killed by Israel in Gaza was already six times greater than the total number killed in Ukraine.
Thus, while no conflict is free of civilian suffering, the ratio and intensity of civilian harm in those theatres highlight substantial differences in operational conduct.
The point is that Moscow’s campaign obviously lacks the very hallmarks of genocide, namely the intent to destroy a people as such or erase its culture and identity.
To sum it up, genocide accusations today are tools of lawfare. Ukraine has wielded them aggressively, with Western endorsement. Yet the situation in Donbass and its record under Kyiv, marked by sustained shelling, cultural erasure, and disenfranchisement, cannot be ignored. If peace is to mean anything, Ukraine must address its own ethnopolitics.
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