The risk of genocide resulting from Russian invasion of Ukraine is very real and other nations must do everything possible to prevent it, says the New Lines Institute and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights joint report on Russia's violation of the Genocide Convention in Ukraine.
The report claims that the Russian authorities are responsible for "the incitement to genocide" based on numerous statements by Russian officials and near-Kremlin publicists who popularized the theme of "De-Ukrainianization".
From this perspective the authors of the report consider various forms of military damage, as well as what can be classified as war crimes (indiscriminate bombings, executions of civilians, rape and deportations) to be facts of genocide.
The issue of "genocide" has long been a political tool in Ukraine–Russia relations: in mid-2000s the Ukrainian authorities defined the "Holodomor" of the 1930s as genocide, while Kremlin propaganda seeks to present the military actions of Ukrainian armed forces against Russian-sponsored separatists in Eastern regions as genocide.