WHAT HAPPENED IN BUCHA, UKRAINE, AND WAS IT A CASE OF 'GENOCIDE'?

In an address to the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russian troops of committing "the most terrible war crimes" since World War II, as outrage and revulsion swept through Western capitals at what appeared to be incontrovertible evidence of grisly civilian massacres in Ukrainian areas vacated recently by Russian forces.

Officials had counted the bodies of at least 410 people in towns around Kyiv until Tuesday afternoon, where Russian and Ukrainian forces fought from around February 27 to the beginning of April, when evidence of potential war crimes began to emerge as the invaders fled.

Bucharest's massacres

The most dreadful finds have been found in Bucha, a Kyiv neighbourhood about 25 kilometres northwest of the capital that had a population of around 36,000 people when the invasion began. More than 300 victims were discovered in the town Zelenskyy visited on Monday, some of them had their hands bound, flesh burned, and had been shot in the back of the head.

Satellite photographs from mid-March are now available, showing streets littered with bodies, with many of the bodies spotted by journalists in the last few days appearing to have been out in the open for weeks. Five victims with their wrists tied were discovered in the basement of a children's sanatorium that was used by the Germans as a "torture chamber" for civilians, according to officials.

The findings have prompted similarities to civilian fatalities in this area during World War II. Between the First Battle of Kyiv (which began in June 1941 as part of Hitler's Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union) and the Second Battle of Kyiv (November-December 1943), when the Red Army began to push the Germans out of Ukraine, the area around the Ukrainian capital, including Bucha, experienced the "Holocaust by Bullets," in which an estimated 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were shot at close range.

Low-ranking Nazi einsatzgruppen paramilitaries roving the seized country murdered civilians at random in homes and streets, murders that were remembered in news stories 80 years later when bodies were discovered next to bicycles, on pavements, and in yards and gardens in Bucha. The initial videos to emerge from the town backed up accusations of mass casualties, which were later backed up by reports from correspondents all over the world. Ordinary civilians were slaughtered without provocation as they went about their everyday business, according to stories and photos of corpses dressed in civilian clothing, some clutching shopping bags.

Low-ranking Nazi einsatzgruppen paramilitaries roving the seized country murdered civilians at random in homes and streets, murders that were remembered in news stories 80 years later when bodies were discovered next to bicycles, on pavements, and in yards and gardens in Bucha. The initial videos to emerge from the town backed up accusations of mass casualties, which were later backed up by reports from correspondents all over the world. Ordinary civilians were slaughtered without provocation as they went about their everyday business, according to stories and photos of corpses dressed in civilian clothing, some clutching shopping bags.

Is it a genocide or a series of war crimes?

Both adjectives have been freely used in furious Ukrainian and Western accounts of the Bucha atrocities. The international community's commitment to respond to these catastrophes necessitates determining if these incidents fulfil those definitions.

Ukraine and the West have already accused Russia of war crimes, stating that it bombed a maternity hospital in Mariupol and a theatre that advertised it was sheltering minors. President Joe Biden has referred to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a "war criminal" on several occasions.

War crimes are characterised as "serious violations" of the Geneva Conventions, which were ratified after World War II and established international humanitarian law in times of war. It is a war crime to deliberately attack people.

Russia's possible war crimes have previously been investigated by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. In principle, Putin might be a target of the inquiry. However, bringing Russian defendants to trial and proving intent will be challenging. Russia does not recognise the International Criminal Court and will most certainly refuse to participate with the inquiry.

Acts "committed with purpose to eliminate, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group," as defined by the United Nations Genocide Convention of December 1948, are considered genocide. Genocide is considered the most terrible and grave of all crimes against humanity.

According to Alexander Hinton, director of Rutgers University's Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, genocide criminals "want to destroy a people rather than defeat an army" and act with "a methodical goal." Hinton stated that he did not feel Russia's conduct amounted to genocide at this time, despite the fact that it appeared to be guilty of war crimes.

However, Gregory Stanton, the chair of Genocide Watch, has stated that Russia has committed "genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity." According to Stanton, genocide is a collective crime perpetrated by a state against its own people or the people of another state, and the Russians "have the aim to eliminate, in part, a national group, and that group is the Ukrainian group" in this case.

Differences of opinion over what constitutes genocide contribute to the international community's reluctance to use the phrase regularly. Apart from the Holocaust, which killed over 6 million Jews, three other genocides are widely acknowledged as fitting the 1948 UN definition: the Ottoman Turks' mass killings of Armenians in 1915-20, the Rwandan genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994, and the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.

"What happened in Bucha and other suburbs...can only be regarded as genocide," Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko stated in an international statement. President Zelenskyy stated the Russian military intervention was "genocide — the eradication of the entire nation and people," "the devastation and extermination" of more than 100 nationalities in Ukraine on Sunday, before the full scope of the horrors in Bucha was revealed.

The atrocity in Bucha has been severely criticised by all of Ukraine's Western allies, including the EU Council, NATO, and the UN Secretary General. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, and Sweden have expelled hundreds of Russian diplomats, and Swedish prosecutors have begun a preliminary inquiry into alleged war crimes in Ukraine, amid calls for additional and heavier penalties against Russia.

Russia has disputed all allegations, calling the claims made in Bucha a "well-directed but sad show" and a "monstrous counterfeit" intended to discredit the Russian army. It has described the diplomatic expulsions as "short-sighted" and promised "reciprocal steps."