According to multiple national governments, international organisations (Council of Europe, OSCE, NATO), independent experts and media outlets, Russia and its ally Belarus are committing genocide against the Ukrainian people as part of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, including the Russian annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbas, and especially in the wake of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent occupation and annexation of Ukrainian territory. Scholars and commentators including Eugene Finkel, Timothy Snyder and Gregory Stanton; and legal experts such as Otto Luchterhandt and Zakhar Tropin, have made claims of varying degrees of certainty that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine. A comprehensive report by the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights concluded that there exists a "very serious risk of genocide" in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Genocide scholar Alexander Hinton stated on 13 April 2022 that Russian president Vladimir Putin's genocidal rhetoric would have to be linked to the war crimes in order to establish genocidal intent, but it is "quite likely" that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine. War crimes committed by Russian forces include the Bucha massacre, sexual violence, extrajudicial killings, torture, looting, the blockade of Oleshky, and the establishment of "filtration camps" to facilitate the large-scale deportation of Ukrainians to Russia.
On 17 March 2023, following an investigation of war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russian Commissioner for Children's Rights, for the unlawful deportation and transfer of children from Ukraine to Russia during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, over 307,000 children were transferred to Russia from 24 February to 18 June 2022, alone. In April 2023, the Council of Europe deemed the forced transfers of children as constituting an act of genocide with an overwhelming majority of 87 in favour of the resolution to 1 against and 1 abstaining.
Background
Legal definition of genocide
Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, genocide requires both genocidal intent ("intent to destroy, in whole or in part") and acts carried out to destroy "a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group" with that intent; the acts can be any of:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2
Punishable acts include genocide and also complicity in and attempts, conspiracy, or incitement to commit genocide, and parties to the convention have an obligation to prevent and suppress them.
Russian war crimes
The human rights organizations Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch recorded mass cases of crimes by the Russian Armed Forces against civilians during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including torture, executions, rape, and looting. After the Bucha massacre, Secretary General Agnès Callamard said that crimes committed "are not isolated incidents and are likely part of an even larger pattern of war crimes, including extrajudicial executions, torture, and rape in other occupied regions of Ukraine."
According to Dr. Jack Watling of the Royal Joint Institute for Defense Studies, these actions are part of the Russian doctrine of anti-guerrilla warfare. Its goal is "to take revenge on the population for the audacity to resist." Watling noted that similar tactics were used in the Second Chechen War, in the Afghanistan conflict, and during World War II.
Representatives of the intelligence communities of the United Kingdom and Germany reported that the killings of civilians were organized. The head of British intelligence MI6, Richard Moore, in connection with the killings in Bucha, noted: "We knew that Putin's plans for the invasion included extrajudicial executions by the military and special services."
On 7 April 2022, German magazine Der Spiegel published data from a German intelligence report indicating that Russian military personnel have killed civilians and executed Ukrainian prisoners of war after they were interrogated. These reports were corroborated by the location and presence of bodies found in Bucha. Der Spiegel concluded that the massacres were neither random nor spontaneous acts by the military. Rather, the evidence indicates that the killings of civilians could be part of a "clear strategy" to "intimidate the civilian population and suppress resistance."
The International Federation for Human Rights and its affiliate in Ukraine, the Center for Civil Liberties (CCL), reported evidence of the forcible transfer of civilians by the Russian military from the besieged Mariupol to Russia and the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and Crimea using filtration camps. According to the CSF, families were separated, and documents and phones were confiscated. According to the CSF, Russian forces also prevented civilians from passing through humanitarian corridors to the non-occupied parts of Ukraine, opening fire on them. According to Ukrainian officials, the same practice was used by Russian troops in Sumy, Kharkiv, and Kyiv.
The director of Amnesty International Ukraine, in an interview with Deutsche Welle on 4 April 2022, accused Russia of using targeted tactics to deplete the civilian population in besieged cities (deliberately cutting off access to food, water, electricity, and heat supply) and bringing them to a humanitarian catastrophe. There were noted cases of blocking humanitarian corridors, shelling of buses, and killing of civilians who tried to leave the besieged cities.
On 20 August 2022, the permanent representative of the Russian Federation to international organizations in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, in response to the post of thanks to the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for the new package of military aid from the United States, published a post on Twitter calling on the Ukrainian population not to be spared. Later, Ulyanov deleted his post. The Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Ruslan Stefanchuk appealed to President of Austria Alexander Van der Bellen and Chancellor Karl Nehammer, demanding to recognize Mikhail Ulyanov as persona non grata and to deport him to the Russian Federation due to his genocidal calls.
During ceasefire negotiations in November 2025, President Putin threatened that Russia would continue fighting "until the last Ukrainian dies" if Ukraine did not surrender occupied territories.
Involvement of Belarus
The Belarusian state and state-affiliated organisations have actively participated in the child abduction of Ukrainian children. Ukrainian children have been deported to Belarus, where they are held in recreational camps. The National Anti-Crisis Management Group, a Belarusian organisation headed by Belarusian opposition figure Pavel Latushka, used open-source information to report in August 2023 that at least 2,100 Ukrainian children had been transferred to Belarus. According to Latushka, they were being held in summer camps administered by state-owned corporations. He also said that state documents showed the transfers are being conducted under the authority of the Union State. The transfers of Ukrainian children have been shown on Belarusian state television. There are indications of re-education efforts by the Belarusian state. Much of the information about the child abductions has come from their parents; children that have been deported to Belarus were abducted from regions of Ukraine which were still under Russian occupation as of August 2023, impeding investigations.
According to international humanitarian law, children in war zones should be evacuated to neutral third countries whenever possible; Belarus lent its territory to be used as a staging ground for the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In a July 2023 interview with the Belarusian state TV channel Belarus-1, Dzmitry Shautsou, the head of the Belarus Red Cross, clad in military clothing embellished with the Z symbol, admitted to the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied areas to Belarus for "health improvement" reasons, saying that it would continue to do so. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies distanced itself from his statements while expressing "grave concern," demanded a halt to the practice, and launched an investigation by its investigative committee.
In February 2024, the European Union blacklisted Shautsou, as well as several other persons and organizations from Belarus for their involvement in the Ukrainian child abductions. The United States, Ukraine, Australia, and New Zealand have also imposed sanctions in relation to the forced deportations.
Statements by officials and organizations
Days after the discovery of evidence of the Bucha massacre, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared that Ukraine was experiencing an attempted genocide. Polish President Andrzej Duda, Prime Minister of Poland Mateusz Morawiecki, Prime Minister of Spain Pedro Sanchez, Colombian President Iván Duque, American President Joe Biden, and Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau also called the situation in Ukraine a genocide. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that the atrocities in Bucha do not "look far short of genocide."
On 13 April 2022, French President Emmanuel Macron said he wanted to be "careful with terms," questioning the usefulness of the "escalation of words" to end the war, specifying that "Russia unilaterally launched a brutal war, and it is now established that war crimes were committed by the Russian army." Zelenskyy criticized Macron's characterization.
The All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations called on every state in the world to recognize the genocide of the Ukrainian people during the 2022 Russian invasion and condemn the ideology of the "Russian world."
Genocide Watch, a Washington, D.C.-based non-governmental organization founded by Gregory Stanton, issued a Genocide Emergency Alert in April 2022, accusing Russia of committing genocide against Ukrainians via a policy of "urbicide."
Several international organizations adopted resolutions demanding investigation into the issue of the genocide. The list includes PACE, the European Parliament.
Numerous other state leaders and officials have made statements about the issue.
In response to the illegal detention of several Crimean Tatar women, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine released a statement accusing Russia of a "systematic attack on the Crimean Tatar people, aimed at destroying their national identity, spirituality, and right to their own land."
International recognition
On 23 March 2022, the Sejm of Poland adopted a resolution on the commission by Russia of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violations of human rights on the territory of Ukraine. In accordance with the resolution, Poland condemned acts of genocide and other violations of international law committed by Russian troops on the territory of Ukraine. The resolution states that these crimes were committed "on the orders of the military commander-in-chief President Vladimir Putin."
On 14 April 2022, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted a resolution, "On the commission of genocide in Ukraine by the Russian Federation," in which the actions of the Russian troops and the Russian leadership in Ukraine are recognized as genocide of the Ukrainian people. In accordance with the statement of the Rada on the resolution, acts of genocide by Russia included:
- mass atrocities committed by Russian troops in the temporarily occupied territories
- systematic cases of the deliberate killing of civilians
- mass deportations of the civilian population
- the transfer of displaced Ukrainian children into the education system of the Russian Federation
- seizure and targeted destruction of economic infrastructure facilities
- systemic actions of the Russian Federation, designed for the gradual destruction of the Ukrainian people
In June 2022, a bipartisan group in the United States Congress introduced a resolution characterizing Russian actions in Ukraine as genocide, and in July the US Senate did so, but neither has been agreed upon as of November 2022.
Countries which recognize the ongoing events in Ukraine as genocide:
Partial recognition (not approved as law):
Investigations and international arrest warrants
In early March 2022, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Ahmad Khan, after obtaining formal referrals from 39 countries, commenced an investigation into possible war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed "by any person" in Ukraine since November 2013. Prior to 2022, the preliminary investigation had found "reasonable grounds for believing that crimes within the jurisdiction of the court have been committed" and "identified potential cases that would be admissible."
On 4 March 2022, the UN Human Rights Council created an Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine to investigate violations of human rights and of international humanitarian law. On 25 September 2023, Commission Chair Erik Møse delivered an update at the 54th session of the council, saying, "The Commission is also concerned about allegations of genocide in Ukraine. For instance, some of the rhetoric transmitted in Russian state and other media may constitute incitement to genocide."
Other investigations of war crimes were also undertaken separately under universal jurisdiction, initiated by independent states.