On Sunday, April 13, 2025, the world’s media, including the leading American network CNN, reported:
“Russian missiles hit residents who were gathering for a Sunday church service in the city of Sumy in northeastern Ukraine, killing at least 34 people in the largest attack of the year. According to the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, among the dozens killed in the strikes on the city center were 2 children, and 117 people were injured.”
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A bus carrying passengers returning from a service was also hit, killing everyone on board. The bus was transporting people from a Palm Sunday service.
Although this news story was not much different from other news stories about Moscow’s attacks on Ukraine during the war, this strike probably caught the attention of world opinion a little more than others. The enemy brazenly murdered civilians with two cluster missiles.
On Feb. 24, 2022, Russian troops invaded Ukraine from many sides. Many Russian leaders, including the Primates of the Russian Orthodox Church and high-level individuals from the Kremlin, voiced the position that the purpose of this invasion was to “wipe Ukraine off the face of the earth.” This completely contradicted the official spin, intimating that Russia was protecting the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine who were under a threat of genocide, which the Kremlin tried to sell to the world at the International Court of Justice in the Hague and at the United Nations Security Council.
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This criminal intent to “wipe Ukraine off the face of the earth” was as damning as a criminal element of the crime of Genocide, outlined in the “UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
Russia’s actions in Ukraine over the past three-plus years strongly corroborates this intent. Russia has aimed its artillery, missiles, and drones both at civilians, including women and children, and at military and strategic targets. When Russia is accused of attacking civilians, it simply tries to lie its way out. Today, almost no one believes the lies because it is very clear on television screens, and Russia’s diplomats are simply not very good actors. At the UN Security Council meetings, Foreign Minister Lavrov and Ambassador Nebenzya have become very transparent. In any event, their performance matters little since the Security Council is helpless due to the Kremlin’s illegitimate veto.
For more than three years, the International Court of Justice has been considering a lawsuit filed by Ukraine two days after the invasion, alleging Russia’s attempted genocide in Ukraine. In March 2022, a preliminary injunction was issued against Russia to stop the invasion, to which Russia has not adhered. The Kremlin has declared that it will not comply with the court’s order. The Kremlin’s behavior and proclamations have become glaring evidence of its intent to perpetrate the crime of genocide.
But due to the weakness of international law and its institutions, the world is far from implementing he rule of law or justice, even when it comes to the highest crime – genocide.
Even China has refrained from demonstrating support for Russia, although it strengthens Moscow by trade and purchases Moscow’s oil. Only Iran and North Korea, global pariahs, and a handful of countries dependent on Moscow in Africa and Central and South America, have sided with Russia. The biggest surprise has been Israel, which often votes against Ukraine at international fora. An explanation or justification is never proffered.
Support for Ukraine is global, morally in words, although not nearly enough in deed. The aid has been mostly inadequate and delayed, supposedly just enough so that Ukraine would not lose, but not enough for it to win. This was the reality until the day the new US President was inaugurated.
A glaring lack of support has arisen recently from President Donald J. Trump, who, having declared himself a longtime friend of the criminal Vladimir Putin, under an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court. Trump offered himself as a mediator of the Ukraine-Russia war, yet often demonstrating a lack of understanding of the gravity of the Moscow invasion, as well as manifesting sympathy for the same authoritarian leader of the aggressor state.
Ninety years ago, in the territory of modern Ukraine, Russia, acting under the guise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, introduced a program of collectivization of land and punishment of Ukrainian farmers, which led to the death of millions of Ukrainians from starvation.
Although collectivization was supposedly an economic program spread throughout the USSR, a part of it, which included severe punishments, the seizure of grain and produce, and the closing of borders, was limited to Ukrainian territory and parts of Russia with a concentration of Ukrainians, such as the Kuban (formerly Ukrainian lands). Stalin’s correspondence with Lazar Kaganovich, the Five Ears of Wheat Law, and a directive closing the borders of Ukraine and the Kuban provide ample proof that while the collectivization was across the USSR, the starvation part was directed against Ukrainians. This attempted genocide against Ukrainians is known by Ukrainians as Holodomor, death by starvation.
This Holodomor of the Ukrainian farmer was preceded by a Kremlin police crackdown on Ukrainian intelligentsia, a show trial in Kharkiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine, and the liquidation of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, followed by further repressions and murders during the Yezhov regime and the liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in 1945, the arrests of hierarchs and clergy, and their deportation to Siberia when the Soviets occupied Western Ukraine.
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, educated at the Ukrainian National University in Lviv, is often called the father of the UN Genocide Convention. He was the draftsman of the Convention and often referred to the famine of Ukrainians in 1932-33 as the quintessence of the meaning of genocide. He published an article about this genocide. The Holocaust was also on his mind. He made sure that the definition of genocide in the Convention included the words “in time of war or in time of peace” so that it was clear that the Holodomor fit the definition of the Convention. The Jewish Holocaust was in time of war and the Holodomor was in time of peace.
Ukraine was the founder and neighbor of Muscovy, but with a much longer history of statehood and culture (Kyiv was founded in the 5th century, the Kyivan Rus state in the 9th, Moscow was founded in the 12th, and the Muscovite state became independent only in the 15th century). This irritated Muscovite vanity and envy. The Russian empire appropriated even Ukraine’s name and religion. Ukraine and Ukrainians have been victims of Muscovy’s envy and brutality for centuries.
Over the past 100 years, two very brutal political, police and military attempts at genocide of Ukraine and Ukrainians by the Muscovites have taken place and continue.
Attempts at cultural genocide have been rampant for over 300 years, starting from the destruction of the City of Baturyn (The Cossack Hetman’s capital) in 1708. Russia replaced the Ukrainian language with its own language and banned Ukrainian in its empire, used its state religion as a weapon to destroy religion in Ukraine, destroyed the Zaporizhian Sich (the site of the Cossacks), introduced serfdom. After the restoration of Ukrainian statehood in 1991, Russia constantly interfered in Ukraine’s internal affairs, including elections, at one time even successfully involving its own agent to become the president of Ukraine, similar to Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus.
Ukrainians, unlike Belarusians, resisted these Russian methods through national revolutions. They say that every Ukrainian grandmother has her role and her Molotov cocktails. Ukraine is invincible (by some accounts Ukraine manufactures the best drones in the world), but the war will continue until the collapse of the Russian Empire and its dismemberment into independent states of the peoples who are today prisoners within it.
It is important to note that although Ukraine and Ukrainians have managed to gain a certain measure of sympathy from the democratic world in both cases of attempted genocide, this sympathy lacks adequate support.
In 1933, at the height of the Holodomor, America under the leadership of President Franklin D. Roosevelt formally recognized the USSR as a legitimate state and exchanged diplomats. Attempts by the Ukrainian-American community to seek the intercession of the President’s wife Eleanor were in vain. The American media, including the New York Times, was largely silent and even echoed the Soviet line. Its notorious lead reporter, Walter Duranty, coined the Stalinist mantra of collectivization, saying: “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.”
Following the tragedy in Sumy, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, the problematic (who wants to divide Ukraine into zones) special envoy of US President Trump to Ukraine and Russia, posted on social media: “Today’s attack by Russian forces on civilian targets in Sumy on Palm Sunday crosses all lines of decency. There are dozens of civilians killed and wounded.” Additionally, Kellogg, drawing on his military experience, stressed that the Russians were clearly targeting civilians.
Attacks on civilians during wartime are a war crime. In the context of intent evidenced by many statements of Moscow leaders, including clergy and their hierarchs, about wiping Ukraine off the face of the earth, this is also an element of the crime of genocide.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky stressed regarding the Sumy tragedy: “It is very important for everyone in the world not to be silent, not to remain indifferent. Russian strikes deserve only condemnation. Pressure is needed on Russia to end the war and guarantee the safety of people.”
While other Western leaders have made strong statements against Russia over the brutal attack, which once again targeted unarmed civilians, American President Trump made at best a routine and at worst a pro-Russia statement aboard Air Force One, the US presidential plane, when a reporter asked him about the attack: “I think it was terrible, and I was told they made a mistake. But I think it’s a horrible thing. I think the whole war is horrible.” There is never a condemnation of Russia.
At an Oval Office press event he even added that Ukraine should never have taken on Russia, many times its size. The hope is that the world today is very different from 1932-33, because the Muscovites are still the same murderers they were. Unfortunately, America seems to be absent from the civilized democratic world and has gone over to the enemy.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
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