Angry Planet - What Modern Genocide Looks Like

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

Christopher Atwood returns to the show this week to talk about a report he helped write for at the New Lines Institute. It’s an in-depth analysis of Russia’s ongoing genocide in Ukraine.Here’s a link to the report:The Russian Federation’s Escalating Commission of Genocide in Ukraine: A Legal AnalysisAngry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. I kind of don't know how to come in, actually. Well, I actually have this one. Okay, do it. Speaking of genocide, we have brought in an expert to talk about a really, really disturbing subject that did not

deserve the laugh that I just gave it. We couldn't figure out how to get into this story. So here we go. Chris, could you explain who you are and what the is going on? Well, first of all, first of all, you're listening to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt, who does things advice for now.

Jason Fields is with me, the opinion editor at Newsweek. We were joined by Christopher Atwood, Mr. Atwood. Could you please tell us, tell the lovely people who you are and what you do? Sure. So thank you. My name's Christopher. I'm a specialist on Eastern Europe, particularly my focus is kind of on or is kind of evolved over the past year or so into looking into the history of colonial violence in Eastern Europe, particularly Russian colonial violence, and how that is manifesting itself in the current invasion of Ukraine. And so last year in May, a team of about, it was like a small team put together a report.

I was part of that team on Russia's violations of the genocide, you know, just a couple of months into the war. And we got a bunch, we got like 50 plus international scholars, international lawyers, genocide experts, Eastern European experts to sign on and basically say Russia's in violation of the genocide. and there's a serious risk of genocide happening in Ukraine. And this year, just last month, in July, we published an updated version of that report, which concludes that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine and that, you know, basically there's a legal obligation to do everything in any given state's power to prevent genocide. Can you explain what genocide is? I think that people don't really know the definition. It's very, very precise. And this report is within that legal definition within the international community, right?

Yes, yes. So the report, the updated version of the report is basically the core group of people who worked on last year's report, which last year, the principal, was a guy named Deona Diamond, who's an international human rights lawyer. And then two principal advisors were Professor John Packer, who is the head of the University of Ottawa's international law department. And then Aaron Rosenberg, who is a visiting scholar at the University of Cincinnati's College of Law and who's also an international lawyer. right. So these are like very serious international lawyers who kind of spearheaded the thing. My role in both reports was as a regional specialist to make sure that we get all of the appropriate nuance. And then this year we brought in the principal author this year is a professor, Christina Hook, who is an assistant professor of conflict management at Kennesaw State University.

Her background is in genocide studies and in anthropology. So the updated report kind of. takes it takes a wider breath to try to explain how this is genocide, why this is genocide. And yes, so we are, we are in this report, we are operating within the, like, you know, that concrete international understanding of what genocide is. And, right, like, it's the, it's a very concrete, defined thing by the, by the genocide convention, although it should be noted that you don't have to have signed the genocide convention for the genocide convention to be applicable. At this point, so many countries have signed the convention. And our understanding of genocide globally is

such that everybody, like, regardless of whether your country signs on or whatever you do, like you're, this, this definition is, is, um, absolute. But basically genocide is, uh, committing one of several acts to, with the main goal being to intentionally destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The impart thing is also really, really, really important. You do not have to, one, you don't have to destroy the entire group, and two, you don't have to intend to destroy the entire group. You just need to destroy a significant enough part of the group in order for, the group's continued existence to kind of come into question. Now, I should say that like the in part part of the definition is something that is debated by international lawyers, and I am not an international lawyer. So definitely take like my interpretation with a slight grain of salt, but that is kind of the way that we operated when we were working on the report, is that in part

just means a significant part of the group. And so then it's also important to define the five crimes of genocide, because the structure of the new report that we put out basically outlines how Russia is attempting. Basically, Russia is using this definition of genocide as like a guidebook on what to do in Ukraine. So the five crimes are killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting conditions of life that will bring about the physical destruction of the group, imposing measures to prevent births within the group and then forcefully transferring children from one group to the other group. And the last one is, in my opinion and in the opinion of a lot of people, probably like the strongest case that genocide as such is being committed in Ukraine.

You make it sound as if literally Russian leadership looked at this definition and said like, oh, this is what we need to do. you know to me that's that's it it when you look at the totality of what russia is doing in ukraine it becomes very hard um to like interpret this another way um it just it just the way that russia operates the way like uh because working on this report right um we did this report entirely with open source uh materials so we didn't like we didn't take any interviews that um were not published anywhere else. We didn't, we didn't, we don't have any like secret information from, uh, or private information from like the Ukrainian government or from any other organization. We have, we've drawn on public reports, which means that, um, I am, I am somebody who has read

a lot of UN reports, um, and a lot of, uh, different humanitarian organization reports on how Russia operates when they occupy an area. And when you read some of these reports, the way that, uh, Russia handles the occupation is, it's absolutely brutal. And it really, it really does feel like they're, they get set up in the first several days of the, of the occupation. They start to figure out who they're going to target for destruction in that locality and how they're going to target them. Like, it really, it really comes off like that. The biggest, to me, the biggest red flag is the way that everybody remembers or people who followed very closely the lead up to the full-scale invasion, remembers the U.S. made a big deal about how Russia was keeping lists of Ukrainians,

of who to target for destruction before the full-scale invasion started. Those lists, by all accounts, are very real. I think the AP did a really great report on who's on those lists. But what is less known is that there are multiple lists. Russia keeps multiple. Russia keeps multiple lists of people. And one of their lists isn't compiled until they've actually occupied a town. So whenever they occupy a town, they do sweeps of residential areas. They knock on doors. They find out who lives where, who does what, who is responsible for what, you know,

sectors of like, you know, intellectual society, who are the thought leaders in the town. And those people end up on lists. They weren't on lists before the before the army occupied that area. They start compiling these lists. And as we kind of point out in our report, like this, all of this goes back to the way that Russia talks about Ukrainians and the way that Russia portrays Ukrainians as effectively deserving of destruction or of death, Russian propaganda compares Ukrainians who are nationally conscious, who view themselves only as Ukrainians, who want to speak Ukrainian, who only want to partake in Ukrainian culture. Those Ukrainians who reject Russian identity, who reject Russian language, who reject their participation in Russian culture, those Ukrainians are portrayed as Nazis.

So when you have this operation where you're occupying a town, you're doing sweeps of different areas, and you're compiling lists of who the nationally conscious Ukrainians in that area are, and those are the ones that are slated for destruction or for imprisonment or for conditions that will make their life absolutely impossible, then it's really hard to interpret those acts as anything other than a deliberate use of what is forbidden in the genocide convention as a weapon of war, basically. Well, that's real World War II stuff. You know, taking the intellectuals or leaders of the town, making lists. Do you know, I mean, you said making lives miserable. I mean, are they actually executing people? So, go ahead.

No, I just wanted to, you know, make sure. No, yeah. They, they, so yes, the, the, like, the targeting of Ukrainians is, like, there are different things that Russia can do with a, with a person who's been targeted. And that person also doesn't have to be on a list, right? Like, Ukraine's report that having Ukrainian national symbols as, as, like, as tattoos can make you identifiable as somebody either for deportation or for destruction. There were reports that during the occupation of the Kiev Oblast, you know, Boucher, Yerpean, Burdian, all of those places, that people were specifically targeted for having nationalist symbols. tattooed onto them. And a nationalist symbol can be something as, you know, as, as, as, as, as, as, uh, innocuous as the Ukrainian coat of arms or a Ukrainian word tattooed. Or one, one really common tattoo in Ukraine right now is getting the letter ye, which is like an eye with two dots on it, which is a

letter that does not exist in the Russian alphabet, doesn't exist in the English alphabet, but exists in the Ukrainian alphabet. And so it's like a symbol of like, you know, Ukrainian, Ukrainian, uh, like the uniqueness of Ukrainian identity and language and culture. And so, yeah, yeah, this can this can manifest in, you know, being targeted for destruction. The biggest example, or one of the bigger examples of this was during the occupation of Hirson, there was a really famous story of an orchestra conductor who the Russian government wanted to have a celebration concert to celebrate the annexation of Herzl. And they went to this guy's house, said, you're going to conduct the concert.

He said, I'm a proud Ukrainian and I will not conduct your concert. I mean, I don't know that he said he's a proud Ukrainian, but he refused to conduct for a concert. And then the military police came back and shot him, I believe, either the same day or the next day. So, you know, like this is something where, you know, if they, determined that you are too nationalistic in their interpretation of what it means to be Ukrainian nationalist, then, yeah, you can be targeted for being summarily executed. This is so Soviet. I just wanted to say that, Matthew. I didn't mean to interrupt. Now, that's a good segue into kind of what I wanted to ask questions about, actually.

So you're a subject matter expert and historian of colonialism in Eastern Europe. And I think that a lot of times when people hear the word colonialism, they think, you know, Belgium and the Congo. They think France and North Africa. They do not necessarily think of Eastern Europe. Like, that's part of the territories that's out in doing the colonizing. Is it not? They might say. Can you kind of give us the actual history there?

of, I don't know that we've talked about this on the show before, but I think it's interesting and it's an important, like, rubric to look through all of this stuff. Like, being caught between Germany and Russia is not a great place to be, right? Yeah. So, I think that's a really good, good, good thing to kind of wait into occasionally. Because, yes, you're right. Most people perceive colonialism as, you know, overseas expansion. You go. you arrive in some foreign place with advanced weaponry and you basically use your advanced military power to subjugate the people and then you use that power to show them that you were dominant over them, dominate them for some time, and then at some point you no longer need that military might in order to maintain your dominance because you've colonized the people

and they recognize that you are superior to them. And so the first thing, that people have a hard time wrapping their heads around is that Ukraine is not overseas from Russia. It is on Russia's border. And similarly, right, like the way that Russia has acted towards Poland historically, Poles certainly feel like they're a post-colonial society. The Baltics also, a lot of people in Central Asia are starting to have that conversation. The way that the, I think what's one of the best ways, to kind of answer this question is actually by kind of outlining how Russian colonialism in particular is different from Western colonialism. And I say Russian colonialism because, you know, other

Eastern European nations and political projects have, you know, potentially engaged in some form of colonialism, depending on how broad we want to define that. And so I'm not saying that Russia is like necessarily completely unique, right? Like some, some, you know, some Ukrainians would say that certain, certain, certain polonization policies were a form of colonialism historically in Ukraine. But right now, if the main topic of the day is Russian colonialism. And so the way that Russian colonialism, chiefly is differentiated from Western colonialism is number one, there is no overseas aspect of it. It is largely just territory. expansion. But then another huge one is that Russian colonialism, because the Russians tried

to colonize a lot of peoples, especially in Eastern Europe, who already had long European histories, this tactic of coming in with better weapons and dominating the society until the point where they recognize that you were superior to them, that doesn't work in Poland and it doesn't work in Ukraine because polls look at that, like they look at Russian history and Russian culture and they look at their own history and their own culture. And they're like, we're not like significantly different and we like our literature better than we like your literature. We like our culture better than we like your culture. And no amount of guns or weapons are going to make you convince us of that. And this then creates a situation where Russia doesn't have an alternative to violence.

whereas whereas a lot of, you know, South American, African, Asian countries have, you know, issues with navigating a post-colonial existence where it's like, guys, like, you know, the way that some post-colonial author is right is as if, like, you know, we should theoretically be free now. We need to chart our own course in some way. that doesn't necessarily apply in the same way that it does in these in in in these uh places in these countries um and but what also happens is that because um because some of the colonialism particularly in eastern

europe is white people colonizing other white people um it creates a different problem that's not the same which is for example in ukraine you had a lot of ukrainians who realized, oh, I can just speak Russian, claim Russian identity, say that I'm not actually Ukrainian, and they'll leave me alone. But you are Ukrainian. You go home and you feel like Ukrainian, but you live your entire life basically internalizing all of these colonial narratives about yourself, and you have to regurgitate them to the urban elites that you're trying to appeal to in order to make sure that you are not bothered. And so this creates a lot of issues in Ukrainian societies that are in Ukrainian society that Ukrainian public intellectuals are very much debating right now. They were debating that for the entirety of Ukrainian independence. But that has become a really, really, really big topic in Ukraine right now. The topic of how do we navigate our like the Russian aspects of who we are. How do we separate ourselves from from Russia culturally?

linguistically, do we, like, why do so many Ukrainian political actors speak Russian at home? And do they need to? Should they stop? Is that just part of who they are? And so there's nothing we can do about it. How do we navigate these kinds of waters? And so it creates certain unique problems, but they are definitely distinct from that kind of Western colonialism that you were talking about.

And of course, Stalin was huge on moving populations from more. one place to another. I mean, if you look at the Baltic nations, some of them still have very large Russian populations, and that's on purpose. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was, I mean, part of part of this, I mean, these Stalinist tactics, you know, are, you know, ironically parod from the Russian Empire, the way that the Russian Empire tried to, tried to protect itself from, you know, the dying kind of heaves of the Russian Empire try to protect itself from, you know, national awakenings around itself. Definitely, yeah, the Soviet Union had a very obvious strategy that, you know, Putin is, is himself trying to recreate in

Mariupil right now. It's something that they've been trying to do in Crimea. But yeah, like, this idea of bringing in a bunch of ethnic Russians, who then will always feel loyal to Russia. Like, you know, I lived in Denezk in 2011, and I remember so many people saying, you know, I'm Ukrainian, I feel Ukrainian, but, you know, my grandfather, my great-grandfather is originally from Russia. And so I have something in me that is Russian, and I can't let that go. And that's an intentional tactic. And the other thing is that oftentimes when we talk about, particularly we talk about Ukraine, we, you know, can also overlook what happened to Crimean Tatars and the way that, you know, if you look at the population dynamics of Crimea from the 1800s to current day, you know, there was there was a concerted effort to change the ethnic makeup of Crimea to russify it. And then during World War II, Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars, which the Crimean Tatars, which the Crimean Tatars, which the Crimean Tatars, which the Crimean Tatars, You know, view as there as a genocide, they also overcame, right? So on the territory of Ukraine,

in that, you know, in that period between the two wars, so many peoples felt targeted by two different powers that were trying to colonize them. And so it is, yeah, it's a, it's a discussion that finally is happening in a lot of places, and I can only hope that it keeps kind of getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more heard, and that we have more of these very serious conversations about, you know, reexamining why we view Russia the way that we do, because I feel like the answer to it is probably a lot of Russophilia around a lot of, you know, academic and intellectual institutions in the West. This also is a nice segue way to, one of the parts of the report that I found really fascinating is how naked a lot of the rhetoric is from Russian leadership and in Russian media.

Can you explain the phrase, we can do it again? Yeah. So that phrase is, is, um, so that phrase goes back apparently to the 1940s. and it basically means like, you know, we can, we can show our power, we can dominate again. And it apparently references the domination or like the victory over Germany. Like, we can make this happen again. And it has, I'm really happy that we went, that we use that as kind of the anchor of how we explored the historical, context of the current day invasion, because it also kind of illustrates the way that World War II historical memory has become weaponized, because now it's less about we overcame a particular evil. And it's more about, which, and I should say, that we overcame a particular evil was a far more ingrained memory in the West than it ever was in Russia.

in Russia, a lot of the historical memory around World War II has been the great Russian people overcame a great invasion. But this has become bastardized so much to the point that, you know, the victory in World War II now just means anyone who Fs with Russia will suffer the wrath of Russia. And so this means that actually this reminds me of a story from I lived in Moscow. And I, when the first invasion in 2014 happened, I was in Moscow. And I was curious what was happening in opposition politics. So I was actually at a petition drive where a candidate for local, for like the local, city council of Moscow was trying to get signatures on a petition in order to get his name on the ballot. And they were just walking up to people who lived in that district who were like, hey, you know,

we know that you might not vote for him, but we think that, you know, the people of Moscow deserve a choice on who they should elect to their city council. And they, you know, they gave this guy's pitch. His pitch was that United Russia is corrupt, that he was like an infrastructure expert, particularly on traffic, how to relieve traffic problems in Moscow. And so he was like, they're corrupt. And so the traffic problems, that's due to United Russia corruption. And this old woman, I remember distinctly, looks at the person trying to get her signature and says, I wouldn't criticize United Russia, because Putin is doing so much to prevent Ukrainian Nazis from coming to Moscow. And they say, well, we understand that. but will you at least consider signing your name so that his name is on the ballot, even if you're going to vote against him?

And the woman says, okay, I'll sign my name because I believe in democracy and I believe that we should have a choice. What is the guy's name? And the person says, Maxim Kats. And she goes, oh, I'm not signing anything for a Jew. And that, to me, is like the perfect encapsulation of the tension with Russian historical memory. The defeat of the Nazis was not overcoming a unique evil that targeted Jews in particular for destruction along with other groups. The problem with the Nazis was that the Nazis tried to invade Russia or tried to invade what Russia views as its own historical territory. And that is ultimately the problem. And so coming back to this phrase, we can do it again, right? the phrase basically means, like, it's used as a jingoistic rhetorical device to remind Russians,

or for Russians to remind themselves and to try to remind the rest of the world that we can, we can destroy you again. We can overcome anything that you throw at us. And it reminds me of, you know, when you're in Russia around May 9th, there's always, people have, like, stickers on their cars that say, like, on to Berlin, right? like as like it started off as a tongue-in-cheek thing and now it's not so tongue-in-cheek anymore. It's like we're going to eventually like dominate Europe again. And so yeah, this kind of, this phrase I think really underscores the kind of bastardization of that historical memory and how it's being weaponized to justify genocide in Ukraine.

Can you tell me about the 60 minutes interview? It's Russian 60 minutes, to be clear. that is talked about kind of alongside we can do it again. And the way the military leaders talk about Ukraine and how that strengthens the case that genocide is occurring. Yeah. So I would I would I would so my argument would be that in terms of how strong the case of Russia violating the genocide convention is, I would say that number one, Russia, is absolutely in violation of the genocide convention. I mean, I'm convinced that they're in violation on several articles.

But if I had to pick one that I could prove 100% beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone could ever possibly have, and I know for sure that there is like, it's an absolute slam dunk. I have all of the evidence that I need in the open. That would be incitement to genocide. So the genocide commission does not only prohibit the act of genocide. It also prohibits several other. acts, one of which is incitement to genocide. And so our report last year, what we found, we did not officially find that Russia was committing genocide in Ukraine. Many of the authors,

including myself, thought that Russia was committing genocide in Ukraine. But in terms of making a legal argument, we felt most comfortable saying that Russia was in violation of incitement to genocide and that there was a serious risk of genocide because, functionally speaking, there is no legal difference in terms of what to do next because the next step is that countries have a duty to prevent genocide. So going back to the question, this is kind of the easiest, most obvious case to make. It's, and it's not even like the the quotes that we included in the report are just ones that we particularly found as powerful. They are not all

encompassing. They are not all inclusive. I forget the website. It's almost as if you have too much material to work with. It's so much. It was part of the problem. So this updated report, to give you a little bit of an insight, is

like 55, 50 to 60 pages somewhere in that. It was supposed to be short. It was supposed to be just a very short summary of how things, how dynamics have shifted. And it became a challenge of like, you know, citing specific examples to be like, yes, these things are really happening. But then not citing every single example that you come across, which means now you have to like weigh what it, the significance of citing one thing over the other. But there is, uh, uh, sorry, um, there is one,

absolutely amazing resource that I will direct everybody to take a look at, which is Just Security has an updating list that they've titled, if you use Google Russia's Eliminationist Rhetoric Against Ukraine, a collection by Clara Apt. It is an absolutely brilliant, it's a living, breathing document that is updated regularly with different Eliminationist rhetoric about Ukrainians. There are other quotes that are just fascinating. So what we tried to capture in the report is that the Russian narratives continually shift. So when the full-scale invasion started, the push from the propaganda machine was that

Ukrainians are all Nazis, or at least not all Ukrainians are all Nazis. we're just going to go into Ukraine, special military operation, we're going to cut out the Nazis. In one of the quotes, somebody says that it's like cutting out a tumor. And you have to go in with precision. But then it kind of starts shifting. And you start around, I want to say, late March into April, around the time we find out about Boucha. You start to hear a lot of concern from Russian propagandists. that actually, oh my God, there are so many Ukrainians that are Nazis.

And then it becomes this problem where actually Russia has lost an entire generation of young Ukrainians who are all deep down Nazis and we have to do something about it, which is particularly concerning when you combine that with the forced deportations of Ukrainian children. You combine that with the camps that they're sent to, with the crimes committed against children in those camps. But then you see this shift to not just like, it's not just their Nazis or they have this Nazi ideology. It's that they're demonic. Like they are literally possessed by Satan. And you start to have these like religious undertone. of like you have to, you have to prove to us that you're not demonic or we're going to destroy you. I have both quotes pulled up here. I'll read them. So the 60 Minutes interview, this is with a Duma

deputy, quote, a maximum of five, and this is 2022, a maximum of five percent are incurable. Simply put, two million people, these two million people should have left Ukraine or must be denazified, which means to be destroyed. And then the next bit is from a military figure. Quote, Russian people possessed by the devil. But if Ukrainians don't want us to change your minds, then we will kill you. We will kill as many of you as we have to. We will kill one million or five million.

We can exterminate all of you until you understand that you are possessed and have to be cured. Yeah, and those run in parallel with, there's another quote from Marguerita Simeon, who is the director of like RT. She's like a really, she's a very, very prominent figure in the Russian nationalist space.

And she at one point in like a couple months into the war made a comment about there are so, I thought it wasn't that many, but there are so many who have just been possessed by this Nazi frenzy. And of course,

Yes, yeah, like they're, they're very open about this. And that second quote that you read, that was from actually one of the, it was literally the first collaborator. He was a guy who declared himself like the people's, the people's mayor of Daneska, the people's governor of Donetska, I forget which one, Pavlovanov. And he is, his background is like, yeah, he's like, he's a Russian nationalist who was involved in like a Russian far right organization. You know, when he was younger. And, yeah, like, this idea that Ukrainians are Russians who have been convinced by the West to reject their own Russianness. And that in order to solve the problems of, in order to save Ukraine and to save Ukrainians in their minds, they have to destroy all of the Ukrainians who are not, who think of themselves this way. and refuse to change. And actually, I also want to point that these quotes also help support the argument by a very prominent international lawyer named Wayne Jordash, who is working with the Reckoning Project in Ukraine right now. And he's also working on the topic of genocide. And what he says, he spoke at a book festival in June. And one of the one of his points that he made was,

So by Putin's own admission, or by Russia's own admission, by the way that we understand Russia and their goals for the invasion, they thought that they were going to come into Ukraine and that the vast majority of Ukrainian society was going to welcome them with open arms and that they only had to resolve problems with a little bit of Ukrainian society. that like, you know, 80% would welcome Russia with open arms. And that's what they were expecting when they first rolled in. That's why they had such a problem, you know, getting to Kiev is they didn't think that they were to have a serious fight on the way there. The problem then becomes, okay, so then what was their plan with the other 20%? Like, what was the plan with the people who weren't going to welcome them? What was, what, what did we, what did they expect to do? And what they have shown us in the subsequent occupation of,

regions, they've shown us what they were planning to do with that other 20% that they, they, the problem that Russia faces is they didn't realize that Ukrainians actually believe that they're Ukrainian. They didn't realize that the percentage of people who are willing to reject their own Ukrainian identity is significantly smaller than what they thought, even in Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine. And that has become a very, very, very big challenge that, um, you know, manifest itself in the way that Russia operates in occupied areas. All right, angry planet listeners. We're going to pause there for a break.

We'll be right back after this. All right, Angry Planet listeners. Welcome back. We're on with Christopher Atwood. Can you, I know that we've talked about it before, but I just want to make it explicitly clear. Can you then talk about the way that Russia operates in those occupied areas? Yeah, sure. So one of the most disturbing parts of, I mean, the whole report obviously is very disturbing. And the way that children are targeted is incredibly disturbing. But one of the hardest things to read and to kind of work on was the, it's so it's Russia's violations of Article 2D of the Genocide Convention, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. And so when Russia's violations of Article 2D of the Genocide Convention, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. And so when Russia,

occupies an area. They make sweeps of the, of different, of different like residential areas. And they will, like, so this, this goes deeper than just making lists. They will specifically,

they will find women and they will target those women for sexual assault. And there have actually been instances where women have testified that, So, for example, I pulled one of the quotes up. There was a woman who was beaten for 10 days during the occupation of Izum, and when she was initially detained, Russian soldiers told her, we'll beat the Ukrainian out of you. They, another woman was held in a basement for 25 days and was told that they were going to rape her until she didn't want any sexual contact with any men so that she wouldn't have Ukrainian children. So basically, when the Russian occupation authorities take over your town, you are at their entire mercy.

I've heard so like just, just so obviously while compiling this report, we have to read through a bunch of stuff and then identify what specifically, like, points to, uh, violations of the genocide convention. but you end up coming across a lot of things. And like, you know, some of the things are just like they will, they will come, they will see a young man. And then they will go and talk to other people. And then say that somebody says something that like makes the Russian authorities think that that young man that they saw three houses ago is potentially a Ukrainian nationalist. Like they will go back and they'll arrest them. or if they find out that somebody had, you know, just signed up for the territorial defenses, then they will go back and they will arrest them. They will go to orphanages and ask where the children are so that they can take them away from the town.

There are, so in international law, there are certain, like, protections that, or there are certain measures that you're supposed to take when you're trying to protect. the civilian population. So for example, if you want to transfer populations in an occupied area, you're supposed to transfer them to a third party country, not to your country, if you're occupying new territory. Now, there are certain, like, you can get around that. Like, if there's a medical emergency and, you know, the nearest hospital is in Russian territory, then technically speaking, Russia would be in, like, Russia would be allowed to, like, take a Ukrainian child to a Russian hospital to get that Ukrainian child, like, emergency medical care. And so they will use that excuse, for example, as well. Another really big thing that you hear a lot of is, so they've,

they've entered your town, they've done all the sweeps, they've, you know, filtered out who they think they need to filter out. They've got the list of people to monitor. So they, they've They will, now they'll start badgering the local media in that area. A lot of the time, the local media has already fled because they know that they're going to potentially be targeted. Or they will take over the editorial staves of these publications, and they'll just start publishing from that media organization's name and claim that now they're suddenly pro-Russian. And then you'll also hear cases of they will start pressuring parents and say, hey, you know, this is a really stressful time right now, especially for your kids. You know that we have a free camp program where you can send your kids to vacation in Crimea or in South Russia or somewhere, and they'll be totally safe. And once we've stabilized the situation on the front lines, once we've pushed the front lines more into the other.

direction, you know, your kids will come back and they'll be refreshed and they'll be happy. And then those kids get sent off. The parents don't have any way to contact the camps that the kids were sent to. Sometimes the parents will eventually get the camp person's phone number. And then you will hear horror stories. For example, after Ukraine liberated the Harkiv Oblast, parents who had sent their kids to camps from the Harkiv Oblast were basically told, we're not going to give you your kids back because you're under Ukrainian control now and we don't trust that. And they will tell the kids themselves. They'll tell the kids like you're not going home until we take back your hometown.

And it's just this, it's this like never ending hell. And this is like this is from reading reports, but I've also, I've, I've, I've, I've spoken to people who have, you know, lived in these, in these conditions who have, have relatives who live in the conditions. And it's, it's, it's, it's way easier for me, um, I recognize to just kind of like outline these things and kind of like highlight the things that, um, I think are the most, um, the most like, uh, important to like highlight in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, and a, and a, and a, and a, and a, and a, and a, and a, and a, just 24-7 hell. And it's just like constant stress.

You have loved ones who are on, you know, Ukrainian government-controlled territory, and you don't know how long you're going to be able to be in contact with them. You don't know how you're going to actually have a, you know, you know if you're ever going to see them again. You don't know if you can actually cross back into Ukraine again. There's actually a really, really amazing film that I highly recommend. That is currently, it just had its theatrical release in the U.S.

And then in the future, I believe that it will be more widely distributed because the distribution is run by PBS. So I'm pretty sure that it's going to be very widely distributed. It's a movie called 20 Days in Maripal that follows the first 20 days of the full-scale invasion through the eyes of a couple of AP journalists. and basically they documented the first 20 days of the invasion from Marriupil. And that film, I will say, is such a brilliant. It's so well documented. The director understood what was happening and that he was living in a historical moment. And so he started documenting literally everything that was around him.

And I will tell you, watching that film after having worked on the two, genocide reports. Like, it lines up one to one with how it kind of, like, with how it, how it reads and how these conversations make me feel, like, seeing the images on the screen, like, 100% line up to what I kind of, you know, envision this feels like. And the other testimony that I've heard from, from other people who have lived under these conditions. So this is from the top.

I just want to make clear, like, the culpability. here. Yes. We've really talked, you know, about, you know, spokespeople, other people are on TV. And, you know, I just, and you also already said that, well, what about that 20% of, you know, Ukrainians who can't be converted back to, back to Russians? Was this genocide land ahead of time? I guess that's that's my question. So that is that is, I'm glad you asked that question because that question is the kind of question that genocide scholars and international human rights lawyers are having amongst themselves right now.

That is kind of the big question. That is the question that is kind of like, that is kind of like one of the forbidden topics at dinner because it turns into a very long debate because there's, you know, there's arguments on both. sides, right? The argument on the, you know, genocide was pre-planned side says that, well, you know, we know what Russia's plan was when they occupied areas, because we've seen what happened when they occupied areas. And so, you know, like, they knew this going in. But then there's also the other argument that says, it says basically they didn't plan to carry out genocide because they didn't think they were going to need to carry out genocide. And they basically created the conditions where genocide would necessarily have to happen if there was the kind of resistance

that they experienced. And that, to me, personally, feels like a slightly more plausible explanation, although both of them to me are like, I feel like the distinction between the two. it has implications in like legal theory as far as I understand but I don't know all of the nuance

of those implications because I don't have a law background but to me it feels like it feels like Russia genuinely bought into these

propaganda narratives that they are living by and that they really thought that they would just come in they'd overwhelmingly you know there'd be overwhelming support for the Russian army

and then you would just magically have Russian Ukraine again, and you wouldn't need to do anything with the people. But the problem is that they necessarily created the conditions under which genocide would have to happen if there's any amount of resistance whatsoever among the civilian population. Right? When you're telling your, so an important aspect of last year's report that was like a huge, huge, huge red flag. was a a

journalist at the New York Times noticed that the Russian army has to consume one hour per day of Russian state media. And when you look at what the actual what the actual

Russian, like the military schedule says, it says like in Russian, it says like informational programming, right? Which means state propaganda, like state, state, run news. So, criminal propaganda. So,

Russian soldiers every day are watching one hour of propaganda that was dominated and still is dominated by what are effectively these genocidal narratives about Ukrainians, right? Like, when Russian soldiers are hearing

that Russian, that Ukrainians who are obsessed with speaking Ukrainian and who refuse to speak Russian are Nazis, that Ukrainians who, that actually there's a lot more Nazis than we initially thought, and that, you know, Ukrainian identity is effectively interchangeable with being a nationalist and being a nationalist is effectively interchangeable with being a Nazi. And then you send that person to Bucha, and you tell them to occupy Bucha, and then it turns out that the people in Bucha don't want to be occupied by the Russian army. And then you're, and then you're

given the orders that you should shoot the civilian population if it's necessary, right? Like, you're creating the conditions. You're necessarily creating those conditions. Whether or not those conditions are being created, like, from before the war started, because they predicted that this would happen. I don't know is, I don't know whether that's, like, ultimately, the ultimate like the ultimate relevant thing to highlight

but rather the fact that you created these conditions and that these conditions created a foreseeable results like it is it's obvious what's going to happen when you send men with guns into a town and tell them to that their job is to denotify the town and that they

can shoot civilians like it's it's you know what you're doing in that in that circumstance so I think that like I think that ultimately I don't I don't have an answer I think that I think that probably they didn't think that they were going

to need to carry out genocide but I also don't think that they saw genocide as a as a problem like that that if it came to eliminating the Ukrainian national identity nobody at the top has a problem with like physically

liquidating ethnic Ukrainians like or national like members of the Ukrainian national group, right? Like they, nobody at the top has a problem with that. They're completely fine with it. You, you know, you see rhetoric like that, right, you know, in the report on Russian national news, but you also see it like in your Asianist political ideology, right? Like the things that Duggen writes and the things that people like him support, right?

Like even like, right, like there's the whole thing with Igor Gyrken Strelkov, who was arrested recently. And, you know, there was a big uproar online that he was portrayed as just like an opposition figure when actually his problem with the way that Putin is carrying out the war is that he's not carrying out the war brutally enough. Whereas, whereas someone like Yevgeny, Priggeny, Prigodzian, is upset that he can't just destroy everything in sight, regardless of whether or not it's good or bad or something that should be destroyed or not be destroyed.

progozhen thinks we should be using more violence to win all of these battles. He doesn't, he's not, Prigodian does not seem like he is super ideologically interested in the destruction of the Ukraine national group. Whereas Igor Djerkin, like, that's his whole thing. Like, that's his whole thing is like restoring this like Russian imperial, um, uh, order. And like he does, like his, his issue with the way that Putin is carrying out the war is that it's not effective enough in destroying the Ukrainian national identity. So, like, there's certainly an appetite for the destruction of the Ukrainian national group, and that appetite has always existed.

So whether or not they went into the war intending to carry out a genocide of Ukrainians, I think ultimately isn't the final barometer, but rather that they were always okay with this outcome and that they created the conditions where this outcome would be necessary. Like it would necessarily be the case if they encountered any kind of resistance and they encountered even more resistance probably than they expected. I don't want to get lost in a Strelkov-related tangent, but I do want to note that I thought it was fucked up when he was arrested that all of the headlines said Putin critic and not convicted war criminal or any of the other things that can be attributed.

me to him. Let me, let me, let me also say that, that, uh, yes, this, this, uh, his, he, he, also his arrest and the whole situation with, um, with, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, progoshan, kind of pointed out, um, that one of the, one of, also kind of a side note, but, um, one of the, one of the, uh, I think one of the things that, uh, Western intellectuals fall into the trap of is, um, they get very cautious. up in the idea of a dissident. Somebody who also rejects Putin. And this is also something that the Russian opposition gets very caught up in. So you saw Navalny publicly voicing support for

Strelkov-Girken. You also heard people in Navalny's camp say, like, we need to support progojin because he is like the best resistance against Putin at the moment when the, you know, March on Moscow was happening. And, you know, you, you realize that, you know, being, especially when you're kind of this deep in understanding things, that, you know, resisting Putin himself creates a lot of very odd bedfellows. And we really have to be very careful not to get caught up in who is a dissident and who is, you know, like, just like being like, well, he technically is a dissident because he was

criticizing Putin and then Putin arrested him. Well, yeah, but why was he criticizing Putin? I just want to make sort of a statement, basically. You know, I think that we have this really stupid idea in the general, you know, Western civilization that we were beyond this, that, you know, white Europeans are beyond this. that, you know, white Europeans are beyond this. And, you know, the United States, I think, tries to throw itself into the same bag. You know, you know, we're certainly beyond this.

And it just shows, man, that, I mean, human nature and, I mean, the demons of the past have not been exercised. Right. I mean, we are still living with the fact that we are human. and humanity has this possible turn of just sucking. I mean, I think that it's like, I think that, yeah, no, I think that it goes really, really deep. And I think that part of the problem with, part of the, part of the problem that I see is that we also want, we always want very, very simple answers to very, very, very complex problems. And what we're seeing in Russia, in the way that Russia is carrying out this war, is it's top-down, no doubt about that. This is Putin's vision for creating his own legacy and for, you know, restoring whatever revengeist ideas he has for the Russian Empire.

But at the same time, this is only possible because there are certain narratives that exist culturally in Russia that have, existed for a very long time that have never been confronted within Russian society. And these narratives are obviously very terrifying, but the way that Ukrainians are dehumanized in Russian culture is not a unique phenomenon in the world. A lot of groups of people who are either protected by the genocide convention or even groups of people who are not protected by the genocide convention, suffer from a similar dehumanization. At the current moment, there aren't as many governments who are willing to carry out the kind of destructive violence that Putin, one, has the capacity to carry out, but then two, has the desire to actually fully go through with it. But I don't think that that's, you know, that's not going to be always the case historically.

It's not going to be the case that, you know, in Europe, there's just this one. case where one dictator has, you know, made it his vision to, you know, to leverage this twisted idea of Ukrainians in order to carry out this kind of a genocidal war. That's, yeah, there are, there are other groups who are also vulnerable and all it takes is somebody with the power to weaponize similar narratives about other peoples and we could be facing the same thing in other contexts

and to a degree in other contexts things are happening around the world that we should also be very concerned about and recognize as similar kinds of violence but yeah no no this is this is not we are not past this

I agree What should the response from the international community be then? I think I appreciated last year there was a hearing held by the Helsinki Commission in Congress on the topic of genocide in Ukraine. And I really, really, really liked Timothy Snyder's answer to this question. basically Tim Snyder said we are in a very unique position in terms of a genocide. There is never been this kind of an opportunity where the victims of a genocide literally have a trustworthy state apparatus that can be supported. Every country in the world has a duty to prevent genocide.

And so that means that that's a sliding scale, by the way. So that means that if you are very close to Russia, you have more of a responsibility to use your relations with Russia to leverage them into not committing genocide. But if we can provide Ukraine with the tools that it needs to prevent genocide on its own soil, then we have not only a moral duty, but a legal duty to ensure that. basically the only thing that the international courts prohibit in terms of responding to genocide is you can't unilaterally enter a conflict to prevent a genocide. So like Russia is invading Ukraine also under the pretext of preventing genocide, right? Like one of the things in the lead up to the full-scale invasion was Ukraine is committing genocide against Russians in Donbos. so we have to go there to save the Russians.

So the courts generally seem to frown on using military intervention to prevent genocide, but nothing stops international, nothing stops the international community from making sure that Ukraine has everything that it needs to prevent genocide. So that means from where I'm standing, that means providing Ukraine with every weapon that it needs. It means providing Ukraine with more artillery. It means providing Ukraine with more training, with air defense. It means using more sanctions against Russia. It means, you know, considering even more measures against Russia. We still haven't.

The State Department is terrified of designating Russia a state sponsor of terrorism because they've never attempted to suspend another country's sovereign immunity that was that large. And so they're very, very, very terrified of that step. But if Russia's designated a state sponsor of terrorism, then also Russia, like, is a place where companies can't do business, which means that all of the huge corporations that have calculated that it's actually financially more viable to continue supporting genocidal war by continuing to do business in that country, those companies will no longer be able to make the determination

that it's economically viable because now you will be in violation of U.S. sanctions. So I think that increasing measures like that, I think that we cannot forget that when we're talking about genocide, we're talking about, like, you know, people view it as the crime of crimes, right? And so there should not be a measure that is too far when we're talking about the kinds of crimes that Russia is committing. It should be basically isolating Russia from the international community and rallying around Ukraine to ensure that Ukraine has everything that it needs to win the war. Christopher Atwood, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through

this. Thank you for inviting me. I really appreciate it. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like us, if you really like us, please go to AngryPlanetpod.com or AngryPlanent.substack.com. kick us $9 a month.

It helps us produce the show. It keeps us going. You get early versions of the mainline episodes that are commercial-free. You also get bonus episodes. Some other stuff that I'm working on that's coming down the pipe. Tell you share more about that with you when it's a little bit closer to being ready. Kevin's on a reporting trip right now. I think we're going to have him on the show when he gets back from that.

I don't want to spoil what it's about. But he's witnessing a pretty important news story. I'm excited to have him on. next week we're going to have somebody come on, talk to us about what's going on in Africa. It's a pretty important story. We're generally going to drill down on why we should be paying more attention to that continent, especially in the West, what it means and what's happening. So we will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet.

Stay safe until then.