Putin's Genocide in Ukraine
When, during the Second World War, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who had made it to the U.S., coined the word “genocide,” he intended that it should cover more than the Holocaust, which had consumed 49 members of his own family. Nazi-style annihilation was the ne plus ultra, but Lemkin argued that genocide could also be somewhat subtler. Genocidaires might want to destroy a national group as a distinct entity while being content to see many of those who had been a part of it survive, so long as they accepted the identity imposed upon them by their oppressors. Time would take care of the rest as the next generation grew up in a new order it did not know was new.
This, not extermination, is what Vladimir Putin has in mind for Ukrainians.
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