Against the backdrop of the current war scare over Ukraine, a recent statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin has attracted attention. In it he blasted Kiev’s handling of the Donbass conflict as “reminiscent of genocide.”
A historian must object. The notion of “genocide” is not a good reference point here. Even a wide definition does not fit this case, because there is no policy or systematic practice of killing the inhabitants of the breakaway areas merely due to their being who they are in some ethnic or national sense – however defined or ascribed – which is the essential, bare minimum condition of the term. In fact, in the same breath the Russian president himself has also warned that the concept should not be inflated.
Yet there is no reason to simply move on either. Even if genocide is not what is happening, Kiev’s policies have been harsh, even punitive beyond what may be required or perhaps justified by war. As the NGO International Crisis Group has summed up this approach, it “has too often treated the security and prosperity of its citizens from Donbass as mutually exclusive with the interests of Ukraine as a whole.” Yet Western media has generally failed to criticize the Ukrainian authorities’ actions.
<blockquote>
<span><strong>Read more</strong></span>
<figure>
<img src="https://cdni.rt.com/files/2021.12/thumbnail/61b3a2aa203027081072837d.JPG" alt="© REUTERS / Kevin Lamarqu" />
<figcaption><a href="/russia/542863-zelensky-donbass-referendum/">Ukraine ‘does not rule out’ Donbass referendum – Zelensky</a></figcaption>
</figure>
</blockquote>
With varying intensity, the conflict between the Ukrainian government and two separatist rebel areas in the Donbass region in the east of the country – together about 40,000 square kilometers – is a rebellion with local roots that has received significant Russian support. The conflict has defied solution by force: Ukraine cannot retake the areas with its military, but the rebels are too weak to force Kiev to stop fighting.
There is a roadmap for a peaceful settlement which consists of the 2015 Minsk II agreement together with the so-called Steinmeier Formula, named after the former foreign minister of Germany. But this compromise, correctly identified as the “best route to recovery” by the International Crisis Group, has not been implemented, largely due to resistance from Kiev which sees this package as unfavorable and unfair, and demands adjustments.
After an initial phase of movement which ended in early 2015, the fighting, interspersed with fragile ceasefires, has been stuck in a stalemate. The rebel areas have consolidated into quasi-statelets without international recognition, their forces and those of Kiev facing off across a mostly static front line of over 400km. Generally reduced to a slow, bloody drip, violence has taken obvious and indirect forms: shelling, sniping, and occasional raiding as well as techniques of blockade.
The total number of casualties – about 14,000 at this point – has been substantial if relatively low by comparison with other conflicts. In addition, several million have been displaced or need humanitarian assistance. Of those killed, a substantial minority have been civilians. Between mid-April 2014 and the end of 2021, the UN’s Office of The High Commissioner for Human Rights has counted almost 3,400 civilian casualties – a figure likely to be conservative.
Life for those six million Ukrainians living close to the frontline, on either side, tends to be especially hard. In 2018, almost a sixth of them were categorized as “food-insecure;” unemployment and impoverishment and the threat of abuse by “both Ukrainian security services and Kremlin-backed rebels” were rife, not to speak of the effects of shelling and mines.
The single most repulsive feature of this conflict has been war crimes. In 2015 already, a detailed Amnesty International report found that, with both sides of the conflict, severe abuses – such as abductions, brutal beatings, electric shocks, or systematic sleep deprivation – were “all too common.” One year later, in 2016, Human Rights Watch came to similar conclusions. Both government and rebel forces were holding “civilians in prolonged, arbitrary detention,” sometimes in combination with “enforced disappearances” when “the authorities in question refused to acknowledge the detention of the person or refused to provide any information on their whereabouts or fate.” Moreover, “most of those detained suffered torture or other forms of ill-treatment.”