What is behind Russian claims of ‘genocide’ in the Donbas?
Moscow will justify any invasion of Ukraine in the language of international law — and the first piece of its argument might already be in place
During a joint press conference held in the Kremlin on Tuesday, Vladimir Putin interrupted formal protocol to contradict his counterpart, German chancellor Olaf Scholz, on a an argument the latter had made in justification of NATO’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999. The situation in Kosovo, Scholz had said, had been different from other security crises, as the Yugoslav government at the time threatened genocide against Kosovo Albanians, and NATO found itself obliged to thwart Belgrade’s malignant intentions ‘at all cost’. Putin’s response to Scholz was curt, but quickly reverberated through the global mediasphere: “I will allow myself just to add that, in our view, what is happening in Donbas today is, in fact, genocide.”
Responding to Putin’s allegations on Wednesday, Ned Price, the spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State, accused the Russian president of trying to create a ‘pretext’ for invading Ukraine with unsupported claims of genocide occurring in Russian-backed separatist areas in the Donbas. In previous weeks, Russian state media had already broadcast multiple reports on alleged mass graves in eastern Ukraine, and rumours over plans by the Ukrainian government to deploy chemical weapons against civilians in the Donbas were widely circulated on Russian social media. None of these reports were, however, confirmed by external sources or by OSCE missions on the ground.
It may therefore be tempting to dismiss Putin’s comments as a clumsy act of misinformation, but warnings about allegations of genocide against Russian-speakers as a possible pretext for military campaigns against Kyiv should not be taken lightly. States wishing to work their way around strict international prohibitions on the use of force have often resorted to moral arguments to back up military interventions, usually on grounds of force being needed to stop particularly egregious crimes from being conducted against civilians. It would therefore be reasonable to assume that Putin’s claims may be part of a rhetorical buildup to an escalation of the war in eastern Ukraine, intended to stir up moral outrage among the Russian public, and increase societal support for an eventual deployment of the Russian military to the Donbas.
More importantly, however, in the post-Soviet area, public accusations of genocide have in the past provided the groundwork not for humanitarian interventions, but for international legal arguments in support of territorial secession and the establishment of independent states.
With the explicit diplomatic support of Russia, separatist forces on the Crimea, in Abkhazia or South Ossetia, in Transnistria, and even in the Donbas itself, have asserted grave human rights violations by Ukraine, Georgia or Moldova as the legal basis of declarations of independence and attempts at territorial secession, in line with a disputed legal concept called ‘remedial secession.’
The tendency on the part of Russian-backed separatist regions to do so reflects an older, larger and more complicated dispute between Russia and Western states over the international law of statehood.
The tendency on the part of Russian-backed separatist regions to do so reflects an older, larger and more complicated dispute between Russia and Western states over the international law of statehood. Under the impression of the disintegration of the USSR, and violent separatist conflict across the former Soviet lands, including in Russian regions such as Chechnya, Dagestan or Tatarstan, Russia had long supported a restrictive approach to all forms of territorial secession, lobbying other states to not accept allegations of government misconduct or human rights violations as grounds for claims to formal independence.
When a coalition of Western states supported the declaration of independence of Kosovo in 2008, asserting that that region constituted a special case, in which its otherwise unlawful separation from Serbia could be justified through grave violations of Kosovar Albanians’ human rights by Belgrade, Russia protested vigorously in defence of its Serbian allies.
Reeling from diplomatic humiliation in the Balkans, and the fait accompli created in Kosovo by Western support for the independence of the region, as well as the insistence by Western nations that the Kosovo Albanians had suffered unspeakable human rights violations, which were unique enough to justify an exceptional suspension of international legal rules on statehood, without setting a precedent for future secession attempts by other entities, Russia after 2008 began to pepper its own statements in support of pro-Russian breakaway states in formerly Soviet countries with near-verbatim copies of the Western arguments over Kosovo.
This pantomime act, grounded as it may have been in political cynicism, problematic readings of international law, and fabricated allegations of human rights violations, has since become a standard tool in the Russian diplomatic repertoire.
Marred by its impotence in the face of events unfolding in Southeastern Europe, Moscow resorted to shining a spotlight on what it perceived to be the hypocrisies of Western policy, mostly by ‘mirroring’ Western behaviours in its own neighbourhood, with the aim of scoring broader points about double standards within the international system or the scope of international law. This pantomime act, grounded as it may have been in political cynicism, problematic readings of international law, and fabricated allegations of human rights violations, has since become a standard tool in the Russian diplomatic repertoire.
A key goal of Russian foreign policy is to portray Moscow as a conservative bulwark in the international system, as a country willing to stand up for the maintenance of global stability against the ‘revolutionary revisionism’ of the American-led liberal West, which Russia regularly accuses of promoting revolutionary upheaval and regime change under the guise of human rights protection. Russia is, of course, not the only state to adhere to such views, and Moscow’s friendly bilateral relationship with China is premised largely on both countries’ shared views on disputes over principles of the international order, with Moscow and Beijing having aired their shared grievances in the form of a ‘joint declaration on the promotion of international law’ in 2016.
For the sake of promoting Russia’s well-curated diplomatic image, which has earned it many an accolade from autocratic leaders worried about past Western support for popular upheavals, Moscow has long made an effort to justify its foreign policy choices in the language of international law.
In the West, Russia is often portrayed as an actor with little to no regard for international laws, and as an arch-enemy of sorts of the ‘rules-based international order.’ But in reality, Moscow has long fetishised its own rather idiosyncratic understanding of international legal principles, and continues to see itself as a state acting in defence of the spirit of a just and rightful ‘traditional’ international order.
Problematic as Russian legal arguments over Crimea, Abkhazia or South Ossetia may always have been — in the absence of an international ‘supreme court’ tasked with resolving disagreements between states over the application of international law, other states have little to no means to challenge Russia’s arguments in all but formal diplomatic complaints.
Putin’s allegations of ‘genocide’ in the Donbas should therefore not primarily be seen as a pretext for humanitarian intervention, but as part and parcel of a possible future argument for the recognition by Russia of the ‘declarations of independence’ issued in 2014 by the ‘Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics’, with a possible ‘annexation’ to follow, disguised as in the case of Crimea as the voluntary and lawful ‘merger’ of two newly ‘sovereign’ states with the Russian Federation.
On Tuesday, Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin announced that the lower house of Russia would vote to request the president to recognise the so-called ‘Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics’ as independent states. Both the Russian intervention in Georgia in 2008, as well as the annexation of Crimea in 2014, were preceded by similar moves to recognise these breakaway regions with arguments ‘borrowed’ from Western support for Kosovo’s independence declaration in 2008.
Should Russia decide to escalate its war in Ukraine, it will not do so without first having laid the foundations for a legal argument in support of its actions. If the playbook of Russian foreign policy in previous years can still offer any clues in regard to how this process might unfold in the case of the Donbas, warnings over Putin’s talk of ‘genocide’ committed against the inhabitants of that region should be taken very seriously indeed.
