Post by Admin on Mar 27, 2022 18:50:08 GMT
In justifying his invasion of Ukraine last month, Russian president Vladimir Putin told his citizens the war was a “special military operation” intended to “demilitarise and de-Nazify” the neighbouring state and to protect pro-Russia separatists in the east of the country from genocide.
Accusing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, a Jew who lost family members in the Holocaust, of presiding over a “Nazi” government is an astonishing allegation and Ukraine was quick to file a lawsuit with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) arguing that Mr Putin was misusing the word “genocide”, coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 with a view to prosecuting the atrocities of the Third Reich, as a bogus pretext for his attack.
The ICJ agreed and ruled on 16 March that Moscow must immediately cease its military operation, an order that has so far been dismissed and ignored by the aggressor.
Despite denying intentionally targeting Ukrainian citizens in its shelling campaigns, Russia has already been accused of war crimes over the conduct of its military during the first month of the conflict, which has seen it indiscriminately bomb maternity hospitals, children’s nurseries, residential apartment blocks, a theatre being used as a shelter and even a Holocaust memorial to the 33,771 Jews massacred at Babi Yar in September 1941.
Rape, torture and murder have also been alleged as cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol are beaten into submission with brutal siege warfare tactics.
Mr Zelensky made his own thoughts clear about what is taking place in his country when he addressed the Israeli parliament recently, telling its lawmakers that Mr Putin is attempting to carry out a “permanent solution”, explicitly likening his methods to the Nazi extermination campaign that led to the mass murder of six million European Jews in its concentration camps.
Of the missile attack on the Babi Yar memorial, he told his audience in The Knesset: “You know what this place means, where the victims of the Holocaust are buried.”
Russia’s actions over the last month have meanwhile begun to inspire anti-Semitic hate crimes abroad, with North Yorkshire Police launching an appeal for information after gravestones in a Ripon cemetery were desecrated with swastikas and the distinctly fascist “Z” symbol associated with Russian troops and support for the war.
For all of that, it should also be observed that Ukraine is not entirely free from the stain of neo-Nazism either.
The basis for Mr Putin’s allegation against Mr Zelensky’s government in Kyiv appears to be the role of a notorious far-right militant group known as the Azov Battalion in the fighting that has raged in the Donbas regions around Donetsk and Luhansk since the Maidan protests and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The group began life as a volunteer force in May that year after Ukraine’s then-minister of internal affairs, Arsen Avakov, authorised the creation of new paramilitary organisations of no more than 12,000 members to battle the rebel fighters.
It was organised by Andriy Biletsky, a white supermacist former football hooligan associated with the FC Metalist Kharkiv ultras, known as Sect 82, who went on help lead the Patriot of Ukraine and Social National Assembly far-right groups.
Accusing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, a Jew who lost family members in the Holocaust, of presiding over a “Nazi” government is an astonishing allegation and Ukraine was quick to file a lawsuit with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) arguing that Mr Putin was misusing the word “genocide”, coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 with a view to prosecuting the atrocities of the Third Reich, as a bogus pretext for his attack.
The ICJ agreed and ruled on 16 March that Moscow must immediately cease its military operation, an order that has so far been dismissed and ignored by the aggressor.
Despite denying intentionally targeting Ukrainian citizens in its shelling campaigns, Russia has already been accused of war crimes over the conduct of its military during the first month of the conflict, which has seen it indiscriminately bomb maternity hospitals, children’s nurseries, residential apartment blocks, a theatre being used as a shelter and even a Holocaust memorial to the 33,771 Jews massacred at Babi Yar in September 1941.
Rape, torture and murder have also been alleged as cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol are beaten into submission with brutal siege warfare tactics.
Mr Zelensky made his own thoughts clear about what is taking place in his country when he addressed the Israeli parliament recently, telling its lawmakers that Mr Putin is attempting to carry out a “permanent solution”, explicitly likening his methods to the Nazi extermination campaign that led to the mass murder of six million European Jews in its concentration camps.
Of the missile attack on the Babi Yar memorial, he told his audience in The Knesset: “You know what this place means, where the victims of the Holocaust are buried.”
Russia’s actions over the last month have meanwhile begun to inspire anti-Semitic hate crimes abroad, with North Yorkshire Police launching an appeal for information after gravestones in a Ripon cemetery were desecrated with swastikas and the distinctly fascist “Z” symbol associated with Russian troops and support for the war.
For all of that, it should also be observed that Ukraine is not entirely free from the stain of neo-Nazism either.
The basis for Mr Putin’s allegation against Mr Zelensky’s government in Kyiv appears to be the role of a notorious far-right militant group known as the Azov Battalion in the fighting that has raged in the Donbas regions around Donetsk and Luhansk since the Maidan protests and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The group began life as a volunteer force in May that year after Ukraine’s then-minister of internal affairs, Arsen Avakov, authorised the creation of new paramilitary organisations of no more than 12,000 members to battle the rebel fighters.
It was organised by Andriy Biletsky, a white supermacist former football hooligan associated with the FC Metalist Kharkiv ultras, known as Sect 82, who went on help lead the Patriot of Ukraine and Social National Assembly far-right groups.