Russia may be committing war crimes, but money keeps flowing in
MONEY AND GENOCIDE
When I worked in the Reuters bureau in Moscow, there were three Russian news agencies’ news wires that we received automatically. Interfax was the biggest and the best, and we tended to rely on it. TASS was the second biggest, but was slow and dull, except for the occasional report from its unique selling point, a North Korean correspondent. RIA Novosti was by far the smallest and was pretty much irrelevant, but we quite admired it for its earnest professionalism. At least it was trying.
So, I cannot tell you how utterly dislocating it was to read this horrible screed on the RIA Novosti website this week. Earnest professionalism now seems to belong in a different universe. The word ‘genocide’ gets thrown around far too much in the former Soviet Union, but this is real Milles Collines stuff: denying Ukraine’s statehood and nationhood, equating Ukrainian-ness with Nazism, and demanding the liquidation of the political class. If you don’t read Russian, or can’t bear to read the whole thing, BBC’s Francis Scarr has picked out some quotes here.
Johns Hopkins Professor Eugene Finkel alluded to this sort of rhetoric in a Twitter thread about his decision to call what’s happening in Ukraine genocide.
- “Until this morning I resisted applying the term. War crimes? Sure. Heinous rhetoric? You bet. What changed is the combination of more and more evidence, from different places, and even more importantly, explicit official rhetoric.”
You may object to using a word as serious as genocide to describe what’s happening in Ukraine, and perhaps you’re right: crimes against humanity is in some ways a more useful legal term. But there is no doubt that what happened in Bucha, and is happening in Mariupol and elsewhere, is dreadful and unforgivable, and is getting worse. I can see nothing to disagree with in this Chatham House article about how Ukraine simply must win.