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Ok, then where is there any evidence of some genocide that happened in Kherson that was controlled by Russian forces for almost a year and was generally pro-ukranian city with absolute majority of Ukranians? If you expect Russia to want kill any pro-Western person in Ukraine and see average as pro-western(so strike on soviet bloc is strike against the enemy) we should see tens of thousands of deaths in Kherson as it happened in history where one side of the war had national eradication as the goal.
Instead we see hundreds of cases and not of killings but detainment and torture - general brutality of the Russian state that it dishes out to it's citizens. In somewhat larger proportion because of vastly larger amount of potential violent dissidents but in the same category nonetheless. This piece for example tries to frame 320 victims in 9 months of occupation of a large as an evidence of genocide but it's quite poor if you can count. “The pattern that we are observing is consistent with a cynical and calculated plan to humiliate and terrorise millions of Ukrainian citizens in order to subjugate them to the diktat of the Kremlin.” says Wayne Jordash, managing partner and co-founder of Global Rights Compliance. On average Russia humiliated/terrorized 1.185 Kherson denizen a day, deciding to adopt this as baseline(as does the article) and correcting for the population, if on 24 February somehow Russians occupied all of Ukraine we would see 160.8 Ukrainians brutalized every day on average. If we accept that millions means at least two millions, to reach this number with rate Russia would need approximately 34 years. Not even mentioning the difference between war and peace time or that you expect to see the rate lowering with time because number of dangerous dissidents is quite limited, this is not looking like a genocide to me, more old and boring authoritarian state thing.
In this I agree with Macron - words do have meaning.
I am not expecting this. I expect them to murder some random subset of such people, or credibly threaten to do this (or torture them or threaten to do this). Continue to do this until they are at least not pretending to not be one.
Refuse to rescue people without Russian passports (there were reports of that, especially after dam destruction).
Loot especially such people, kidnap their children etc.
if Russia state would not be busy primarily with fighting against Ukrainian forces this would likely get much worse
It mentions that just one specific organisation examined 320 cases. Not that 320 cases were found.
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add to that number of people that prefer to shut up rather than risk anything, were not processed by them, were raped and prefer to not report it, were murdered/kindapped and cases are not yet discovered...
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Sigh.
This is where I note that I did not use the word genocide, but national destruction, precisely to avoid this semantic debate.
Which is a shame, since it was as a courtesy and non-insinuation towards you, because the Russian war crimes both in execution and occupation do amount to criteria of genocide by the standards of international law, as codified by Article II of the Genocide Convention, which was established precisely to set such a criteria.
The current definition of Genocide is set out in Article II of the Genocide Convention: Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
This is, indeed, arguably broad, which is why genocide charges will generally follow after statements denying the existence, humanity, or legitimacy of a group being targeted by the targetter. Which Putin helpfully provided with the Russian pre-war narrative buildup denying the existence of a Ukrainian nation, pre-emptive victory articles asserting common Russian identity, and the subsequent execution of the war.
Which has included, among other things- A- Easy check, bombardment of civilian population centers with indiscriminate fires when more precise measures exist as an alternative munition, and massacres of detained civilians B- Also easy check, given not only bombardment of refugee evacuation corridors but establishment of torture centers and target lists to go after Ukrainian nationalists C- Another easy check, as there was an entire winter campaign about targeting civilian power infrastructure to the neglect of military targetting with the only appreciable target of mass denial of power required for civilian services such as winter heating E- A matter of record at this point, as the forced evacuation and subsequent processing of Ukrainian children for adoption in Russia is precisely what this category covers
We... have seen tens of thousands of Ukrainian casualties in the war so far.
That the Russians did not establish Nazi-style concentration camps for industrialized slaughter during the midst of their first campaign season does not change that, nor is it a standard or prerequisite for genocide to categorically meet the definition of genocide.
Moreover, this would go back to you not understanding the logistics involved again. The Nazi concentration camps were so horrendous in large part because of how much industrial capacity and investment they took for that one purpose, which was outside the norm for genocidal campaigns. It was a massive function of logistics... which have been a noted weakness of the Russians over last year, even if it were their intended style, which is not the allegation or the requirement.
What's more important, however, is that you are rather unsubtly shifting the frame of debate to try and joust with strawman. The point was not that they were prepared to kill any pro-Western person in Ukraine. The point was that the plan- as in, the thing they had before they went in based on what they thought they knew- was built on what they thought the allocation of sentiment was like. Which goes to the critical mistake of Putin believing his own propaganda and believing that there was a pro-Russian majority eager to side with a Russian intervention against a despised Ukrainian government, and thus that pro-westerners were a minority to be suppressed and filtrated.
In other words- the Russians vastly underestimated the number of anti-Russian/pro-Westerners they'd be dealing with, because they were incompetent, and didn't prepare the logistics of scale needed despite the intent for what they were planning.
In this, you and Macron would be wrong, precisely because words do have meaning. The legal definition of genocide has been quite a bit broader than just 'Nazi-style concentration camps' for longer than you've been alive.
Macron, of course, has the excuse for motivated disinterest in the truth because he is a national leader who in late April 22 was still hoping to salvage some sort of cease fire and return to status quo ante rather than face the economic and political setbacks that would be more likely if he called Putin and Russia particularly unflattering but true things.
The Bucha massacre and then-ongoing bombardment of residential zones with occasional refugee columns kind of undermined his position, and that of the European 'peace' movement that was sharing in the pro-Russian denial mode of the early months precisely because acknowledging Russian crimes against humanity undermined appeals for immediate cease fires and peace talks.
I think it's worth noting that while the camps are the most well-publicized part of the Holocaust, a decent fraction of the deaths, especially early in the war were attributable to death squads with guns rounding up "undesirables."
There have definitely been recorded mass graves in places like Bucha that at least seem to resemble this sort of policy of wanton death.
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