Russians accuse Ukrainians of genocide as they pave way for potential invasion

It was during an otherwise civil exchange with German chancellor Olaf Scholz this week that Vladimir Putin dropped the g-word. 

“If I may: in our view, what is happening in the Donbas today is genocide,” he told reporters at a joint press conference, referring to east Ukraine’s separatist-controlled region.

It was an off-the-cuff remark, meant as a rebuke to Mr Scholz after he defended Nato’s involvement in the Balkans conflict in the 1990s by saying it prevented genocide there. The German chancellor later dismissed it as “wrong”.

But among Russia-watchers, it instantly raised fears that after months of official silence, Moscow was now formally laying the groundwork for justifying a potential invasion of Ukraine to both the Russian public and the international community. 

From media figures to top diplomats, this last week has seen a number of prominent Russians invoke the baseless idea that the Ukrainian government is perpetrating a “genocide” against the hundreds and thousands of ethnic Russians living in its east. 

“People are dying there every day; thousands of children have lost legs or arms; thousands of children were buried in tiny coffins,” Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of Russia’s major propaganda outlet RT, said in a tearful speech about eastern Ukraine on a prime-time TV show last Sunday.

“Russia has no choice but to stop this war. What are we supposed to wait for? Until there are concentration camps and (Ukraine) will be gassing their population? This is what’s going to happen. It’s going to get worse.”

On Wednesday, Russia’s Investigative Committee, which typically deals with high-profile crimes, suddenly announced that it had opened a probe into alleged evidence of mass graves of “hundreds” of Russian-speaking civilians and indiscriminate shelling in eastern Ukraine since 2014. 

Alexander Bastrykin, the committee’s chief, insisted there was an “obvious intention to eliminate residents of the Donbas.”

Within 24 hours, Russia’s delegation to the UN had doubled down on the claims, filing a report with the international body that accused Ukraine of seeking the “genocide of the Russian-speaking population of the Donbas”. 

The White House has tried to push back. Ned Price, the US State Department spokesman, said this week that there is "no basis of truth to any of these allegations”.

He warned: "These are false narratives that Russia is developing for use as a pretext for military action against Ukraine."

Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to the US, was quick to push back. “I’m enraged and upset. How else can you call Ukraine shelling of residential areas by multiple rocket launchers?” he said on Friday.

The accusations of genocide - a potent weapon of political rhetoric in Russia that for many signifies the ultimate evil - are not new. 

They first emerged back in 2004, during Ukraine’s pro-democracy 2004 Orange Revolution, and became commonplace during Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. 

That invasion was met with jubilation in Russia, partly because state TV had bombarded viewers with anti-Ukrainian propaganda for months, peddling outright lies about Ukrainian neo-Nazis plotting to come and massacre the peninsula’s ethnic Russians.

Fighting in the Donbas, once Ukraine’s industrial heartland, was in part fueled by Moscow officials and media who dismissed the government elected in 2014 as Russian-hating Nazis.

No evidence has ever been found to support any of the claims. 

Separate reports by the OSCE, the Council of Europe, and the OHCHR found no evidence that the Russian minority in Eastern Ukraine was at risk of persecution by the Ukrainian authorities. 

Hostilities in eastern Ukraine have killed more than 14,000 people, both ethnic Russians and Ukrainians, but a ceasefire there has - until recently - largely held since 2019. The number of children killed in the conflict currently stands at 152, according to the United Nations.

Journalists covering the fighting in 2014-15 did find mass burial sites that included unmarked graves, but they were largely used for unidentified combatants and poor people with no relatives to bury them.

Eight years of conflict in the Donbas have further obliterated the Kremlin’s claims. The current frontline cuts across the largely Russian-speaking east and does not follow an ethnic or a language divide. 

In fact, Russian is still predominant in many of the important parts of Ukraine, including the capital Kyiv and Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city near the Russian border. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy himself is a native Russian speaker, although he uses Ukrainian in official settings.

But regardless of the claim’s veracity, fighting a genocide has resonance in Russia and on a global stage. It puts any invasion in the Western-friendly context of protecting human rights, and domestically, it fits into a broader narrative of ethnic Russians being persecuted in other post-Soviet states. 

The fact that such accusations are resurfacing now and being used at the highest levels is a worrying sign, experts say. 

“There are lots of indicators pointing towards a worrying scenario: We’re talking about shelling from both sides, statements about mass graves, and words about ‘genocide’ from the president that have been taken up by other officials down the line,” Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, told the Telegraph. 

“It testifies to the degree of escalation we’re seeing.”

Russian watchers had previously held out hope that the Kremlin was not seriously entertaining an invasion of Ukraine because state television had not been as vocal about alleged atrocities as it was in 2014 before the annexation of Crimea.

“Russian society was ready for the Crimea annexation but things are different now,” said Mr Gabuev.

The surge in genocide rhetoric could reverse that, however.

On Friday, Mr Putin once again accused Kyiv of “mass and systematic violation of human rights” against Russian-speakers in Donbas.

“The fact that the word genocide is getting normalised is quite telling,” added Mr Gabuev. “Any action against Ukraine will be better received if there is a proper explanation for ordinary Russians.”