Ukrainian Ombudsman Criticises Statement by UN International Commission on Lack of Evidence to Recognise Genocide in Ukraine

Dmytro Lubinets, the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights, has criticised the statement by the UN International Commission on the lack of evidence to recognise the genocide in Ukraine. The official wrote about this on his official Telegram channel.

The Ombudsman emphasises that Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide clearly explains what counts as genocide.

Lubinets clearly points to the facts confirming that Russia is organising genocide in Ukraine:

• Killing members of the group: the UN reported that 9,444 civilians had been killed in Ukraine.
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group: almost 17,000 people were injured as a result of Russian aggression.
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part: massive missile attacks on the energy infrastructure of Ukraine in the winter and the undermining of the Kakhovka HPP by Russian invaders. Conditions in which Ukrainians live near the front line.
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group: according to the Office of the Prosecutor General, 225 cases of sexual violence committed by Russians have been registered in Ukraine since 24 February 2022.
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group: the Russian occupiers deported 19,546 Ukrainian children.

“If these facts are not enough for the UN International Commission to admit the obvious, I invite its representatives to visit the settlements liberated by Ukrainian soldiers or settlements located not far from the front line! Everything will immediately become obvious there!” Lubinets noted.

Earlier, the advisor to the head of the President’s Office, Mykhailo Podolyak, sharply reacted to the UN statement that the Commission had not yet come to the conclusion that the aggressor country Russia was committing the crime of genocide in Ukraine.

Podolyak said the United Nations was showing “a never-ending master class of political toothlessness and indirect encouragement of a criminal.”

“The Commission bluntly says that they saw no intent to commit genocidal crimes on the part of Russia against Ukrainian citizens. Absolutely, because the Russians came to kill us… kindly, en masse. Ukrainians exactly, but without premeditation. And the missiles are flying into the cities every night in a kindly manner. And the attempt to destroy the energy infrastructure in the winter so that people are killed by frost is completely accidental,” Podolyak said.

He added that, according to the international organisation, a full-blown war with hundreds of Ukrainian towns and villages wiped out to the ground was strictly within the bounds of acceptable “non-genocide.”

On 4 September,  the chair of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, Erik Møse, stated that the Commission had not yet found sufficient evidence of the genocide in Ukraine.

At the same time, he noted that it had recorded a select number of violations by Russian troops. The violations include wilful killings, unlawful confinement, torture, rape, and other sexual violence, and unlawful transfers and deportations of protected persons and children. Many of these violations qualify as war crimes, and some of them may, if confirmed by further evidence, amount to crimes against humanity.

Bohdan Marusyak