A new report on Russian atrocities in Ukraine is both “the worst possible news” and “welcome,” a Ukrainian Catholic archbishop told OSV News.
“The Russian Federation’s Escalating Commission of Genocide in Ukraine: A Legal Analysis” was released July 26 by the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, and the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights, a Montreal-based nonpartisan global coalition for human rights advocacy and justice.
The 57-page report, which follows a similar report jointly issued by the two organizations in May 2022, concludes that “the Russian Federation has not only committed but escalated its efforts to commit genocide” in Ukraine, wrote Azeem Ibrahim, senior director of the mass atrocities and law portfolio at New Lines, in the foreword to the document.
“It is ironic to welcome a report on genocide,” Metropolitan Archbishop Borys Gudziak of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in the U.S. said in an emailed statement to OSV News. “But it is good that the report is being made and it should be brought to the widest possible audiences.”
The report, covering the period Feb. 24, 2022, (the date of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine) through June 15 of this year, found that “an escalated pattern of systematic atrocities” by Russia in Ukraine constitutes a “violation of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
Read more in OSV News.
