The thread of destruction and eradication runs through daily life in occupied Ukraine. Russian occupation officials have discussed forcibly deporting or summarily executing civilians who display characteristics deemed to be pro-Ukrainian or anti-Russian. Russian administrators use the threat of withholding access to basic goods and services to coerce Ukrainians to give up their Ukrainian passports for Russian ones, permanently changing the Ukrainian spelling of their names to the Russian version. Russian economic “enrichment” and infrastructure “development” projects cripple the ability of occupied areas to exercise economic self-sufficiency, generating devastating dependencies on the Russian federal government and driving a wedge between Kyiv and occupied territories.

Again, this constitutes genocidal behaviour, even when it is not exterminating people. 

That said, Russia’s efforts to destroy Ukraine include ethnically-cleansing occupied Ukraine by replacing Ukrainians with Russian citizens. Russian officials claim that Russia has “accepted” over 4.8 million Ukrainians, including 700,000 children, since the beginning of the war. 

There is no way to verify this number, but it emphasises the scale of movement to Russia from Ukraine since 2022, all of which occurred in the coercive context of Russian military occupation. The Kremlin is repopulating occupied Ukraine with Russian citizens to fundamentally alter its demographics and complicate future reintegration efforts. Based on examples of similar ethnic cleansing in the past, many will have inevitably died as a consequence. And that is before one even considers the blatant executions of innocent civilians by Russian soldiers, or the deliberate targeting of civilian population areas.

International legal procedure is set up to deal with atrocities after they happen. This is why Russian war crimes in Bucha, Izyum, Kherson City, and other liberated settlements have received widespread international attention and condemnation, and deservedly so. This is why the ICC has issued arrest warrants for Putin and Lvova-Belova, as their crime of facilitating the deportation of children is visible and evident. 

The international humanitarian community is less effective, however, at addressing what happens daily behind the frontlines. In many cases, Russia’s genocidal project in Ukraine is banal, mundane, and hard to track and prove. But every aspect of Russia’s occupation of Ukraine is deliberate and flows from Putin’s initial justification for the invasion. It is meant to make real the Kremlin lie that Ukraine has no right to exist and that there is no such thing as a Ukrainian people.