Moscow is already carrying out ethnic cleansing.
The brutal character of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been clear even before it started. Western intelligence sources, disbelieved and derided by many, predicted that the Russians would enter Ukraine with “kill lists” of potential sources of trouble, who were to be rounded up and dealt with to render the country easier to rule.
This was the plan even when Russia believed it could win a quick victory with minimal resistance. Since that proved impossible, the viciousness has come out in other ways. Stubborn cities and points of resistance are being bombarded to rubble. Civilian targets across Ukraine are being hit with bombs and missiles. Civilians are being deported deep into Russia through a network of “filtration camps.” And where the Russian advance was turned, the advancing Ukrainian armed forces encountered evidence and stories of mass summary executions.
Ukrainians have described this as attempted genocide. It goes that President Vladimir Putin’s Russia wished to erase Ukraine as a political and national entity and to “Russify” its inhabitants—by killing some, deporting more, and reeducating others. The massacres showed only how advanced and savage this plan already was.
Read the rest in Foreign Policy.
