Atrocities committed by russians in Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol, Izyum, and Kherson horrified whole world. Unpunished evil is dangerous – MFA

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On December 9, on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and Honoring their Dignity, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine calls on the world to jointly and resolutely take all possible measures to prevent and stop the crime of genocide. The purposeful destruction of an entire national, ethnic, racial or religious group is the worst crime against humanity, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine said in a statement.

Unfortunately, there are many such dark pages in human history. 

In Ukraine during 1932-1933 Stalin’s regime starved millions of people to death in order to exterminate the Ukrainians as a national group, and artificially created famine on the lands which had been known as the “Breadbasket of Europe” for centuries.

Almost simultaneously with this inhumane act, having been convinced of the impunity of the Stalin’s regime, Hitler began the mass extermination of Jews – the Holocaust that lasted for decades.

In May 1944, being convinced that all of Europe’s attention was focused on the Hitler’s crimes, the bloody Stalinist regime took on the extermination of the Crimean Tatars by forcibly deporting an entire indigenous people from Crimea. Within a few days, the Crimean Tatars were uprooted from their native land and transported in freight wagons into far districts of Siberia, Urals and Central Asia. Thousands of people died along the way. More than two hundred thousand people, mostly children, women and the elderly, became the victims of this crime.

The russian aggression against Ukraine, which has been ongoing for the eighth year in a row, has shown clear signs of genocide. Atrocities committed by the russian occupiers in Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol, Izum, Kherson, deliberate destruction of critical civilian infrastructure horrifies the whole world. The criminal kremlin regime – the rigorous heir of his Stalinist predecessor – also aims at elimination of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars, erasure of Ukrainian ethnic and cultural identity, denial of the rich history of the Ukrainian state and nation, and obliteration of the native language.

Reminding the international legal obligations of states to cooperate in order to prevent and stop genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine calls on the international community to increase pressure on the russian Federation, to increase the amount of military and humanitarian aid to the Government of Ukraine, to promote proper investigation and documentation of the crimes committed by the russian Federation in Ukraine, as well as to support the creation of a special tribunal for the crime of russian aggression against Ukraine in order to bring russia and its officials to justice.

We will also continue working on the worldwide official recognition of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. 19 countries in different parts of the world have already recognized it. We express our sincere gratitude to these states for such support and call on countries that have not yet done so to adopt relevant documents at the legislative level.

Unpunished evil is dangerous. This is why it is crucial to establish responsibility for the crimes of the past to make sure they will never be repeated in the future.

For reference: According to the Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (approved and proposed for signature and ratification or accession by the UN General Assembly on December 9, 9 1948)  genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such: killing members of the group; causing bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The author of the legal term was a lawyer Rafael Lemkin. 

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