As leaders debate ‘genocide,’ a growing focus on atrocities in Ukraine

The dueling rhetoric revealed the difficulties of responding to a conflict increasingly defined by horrifying images of mass slaughter — without either shutting potential pathways to a diplomatic solution or falling out of step with key allies.

A prosecutor with the International Criminal Court visited the ravaged Kyiv suburb of Bucha on Wednesday as two international organizations published reports showing the extent of the devastation the invasion, which is entering its eighth week, has wrought across Ukraine.

The 57-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe accused Russia of illegally targeting hospitals, schools, residential buildings and water facilities, leading to civilian deaths and injuries. The United Nations said damaged water infrastructure and electricity networks have left 1.4 million people without running water in eastern Ukraine, with 4.6 million people across the country — more than 10 percent of the prewar population — at risk of losing their water supply.

Ominous rhetoric gains ground in Russia as war in Ukraine founders

There’s scant disagreement in the West about the severity of the crisis or Russia’s role in perpetuating it. But Biden’s impromptu genocide declaration, during a speech about ethanol in Iowa on Tuesday, surprised some European leaders who maintain channels of communication with Russia in the hope of brokering a cease-fire.

Genocide is defined as the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular ethnic group or country with the aim of destroying that community. Countries that signed the 1948 Genocide Convention, including the United States, are obligated “to prevent and to punish” genocide, according to the convention. That’s why declaring a genocide carries important political, moral, and legal and diplomatic weight.

“Genocide has a meaning,” Macron told the France 2 television broadcaster on Wednesday. “The Ukrainian people and the Russian people are brethren people.”

“What is happening is madness, it’s a brutality that’s unheard of,” he added. “But at the same time I am looking at the facts, and I want to do as much as possible to continue trying to stop this war and rebuild peace. So I’m not sure that an escalation of words serves the cause.”

Macron’s remark prompted an angry response from Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Oleg Nikolenko, who said the French president’s “unwillingness to recognize the genocide of Ukrainians after all the outspoken statements of [the] Russian leadership and criminal actions of [the] Russian military is disappointing.”

“‘Brotherly’ people do not kill children,” Nikolenko said, adding that “there is no moral, no real reason to conduct conversations about the ‘brotherly’ relations of Russian and Ukrainian peoples.”

Shortly after making the genocide declaration in his speech on Tuesday, Biden approached reporters and clarified that he would “let the lawyers decide” but that “it sure seems that way to me.”

The White House had already been flooded with questions about the comment. Biden decided he would go over to the cameras before Air Force One took off and make it clear that he intended to make the comment and that it is his personal belief. The incident harked back to Biden’s recent trip to Poland when he also went further than his top aides had been willing to go in declaring Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal.”

On Wednesday, State Department spokesman Ned Price said the department would be assisting the international effort to document and collect atrocities allegations to see if the “legal threshold is met” to declare genocide. When asked if Biden’s outspokenness could undermine the legal process, Price defended the president’s actions, saying he was putting a “very public spotlight on the atrocities that are taking place in Ukraine right now.”

“For us, we want the world’s attention to remain trained on this,” Price said.

The agitation over how to label atrocities is no small matter, said Zachary D. Kaufman, an international legal expert at the University of Houston Law Center. “Morally, many view genocide as the most heinous of all crimes,” he said. “So, characterizing an atrocity as genocide makes stopping it extremely compelling morally.”

There are also reasons for why some leaders are more sensitive about using the word than others.

“For Biden, talking about genocide in Ukraine is a rhetorical opportunity to ratchet up pressure on Putin,” said Richard Gowan, U.N. director at the International Crisis Group. “For Macron, avoiding the phrase is about keeping open some channel for diplomacy.”

The scene inside Bucha, as seen by a Washington Post photographer

For the United States, moral outrage also can be used to pressure allies to do more to support Ukraine, in the form of military and economic aid, and punish Russia, in the form of bans on oil or gas imports.

“The more hawkish allies such as Poland, Britain and sometimes the United States are constantly upping the moral ante to try to shame countries such as Germany, Italy and Turkey who are taking a slightly more dovish approach,” said Jeremy Shapiro, research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

But he said the rhetorical escalation carries risks, too: “If this war does indeed grind on and the atrocities mount as they usually do in both quantity and quality, we may someday regret that we used up all of our moral ammunition so early.”

How far will Biden go in helping Ukraine? And where would you draw the line?

Wednesday was not the first time Macron has diverged from Biden’s comments on the war. Late last month, the French president cautioned against escalating the conflict through words or actions after his U.S. counterpart declared that Putin “cannot remain in power.”

In early March, Putin called Macron for a 90-minute discussion about Ukraine, but there was no diplomatic breakthrough.

“Your country will pay dearly because it will end up as an isolated country, weakened and under sanctions for a very long time,” Macron reportedly told Putin.

Given the length of time required to make a formal finding of genocide, Biden is unlikely to find legal backing for his view anytime soon. But efforts to confirm allegations of atrocities advanced this week, with ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan touring Bucha amid mounting evidence that Russian troops committed atrocities there. Khan had announced an investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine shortly after the Feb. 24 invasion.

“We have to pierce the fog of war to know the truth,” Khan said, according to the Agence France-Presse news agency.

Last week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the grisly scenes in Bucha, a Kyiv suburb where bodies were discovered in every neighborhood after Russian troops retreated, did not “look far short of genocide.”

Investigators have been able to access Bucha and other territories formerly held by Russian forces following a shift by Putin to focus on eastern and southern Ukraine in the face of heavy losses near Kyiv and elsewhere.

Russian military commanders across the border continue to stage troops, helicopters and artillery ahead of an anticipated assault in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region and farther south, the Pentagon said Wednesday. Some units already are flowing into northern Luhansk, the scene of routine fighting for many years between Ukrainian government forces and separatists backed by the Kremlin.

Most Russian airstrikes remain focused on targets in Donbas and in the besieged city of Mariupol, said a senior U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Pentagon. “We still hold Mariupol as a contested city,” the official said, addressing Russian claims that a large number of Ukrainian troops had surrendered. “We still hold that Ukrainian forces are in Mariupol and defending it.”

Russia categorically rejected Biden’s claims of “genocide” in Ukraine. “We consider it unacceptable to attempt such a distortion of the situation,” said Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “This is hardly acceptable for the president of the United States of America.”

U.N. officials are judicious in using the term genocide; the world body has noted that it is frequently misused “in referring to large scale, grave crimes committed against particular populations.” Only a few incidents have been defined as genocide by judicial bodies, the United Nations said, including the 1994 killings of the minority Tutsi in Rwanda.

Amid the semantical debate over genocide, there were also signs that European countries were coming closer together in the way they view the threat from Russia. Leaders of Finland and Sweden said they were reexamining their longtime decisions to stay outside the Western military alliance NATO.

Prime Minister Sanna Marin said Finland’s decision will be made in coming weeks. “There are different perspectives to apply [for] NATO membership or not to apply and we have to analyze these very carefully,” she said at a news conference in Stockholm. “But I think our process will be quite fast.”

Advocates for Ukraine said it was important for the West to underscore shared interests, such as deterring Russia, rather than internal disputes.

“There is a risk that the U.S., France and other friends of Ukraine will now waste time parsing the exact status of the atrocities in Ukraine,” said Gowan, of the International Crisis Group. “Do not let a terminological argument over what constitutes genocide distract from the concrete policies needed to stop the dying, whatever you call it.”

Biden authorized an additional $800 million in security assistance for Ukraine on Wednesday, which he said would include “many of the highly effective weapons systems we have already provided and new capabilities tailored to the wider assault we expect Russia to launch in eastern Ukraine.”

The Pentagon said the package will include Mi-17 helicopters along with 18 howitzers that are 155 mm, 40,000 artillery rounds and 300 switchblade drones.

The European Council said it agreed to 500 million euros ($544 million) in additional support for Ukrainian forces.

Suliman and Hassan reported from London. Rick Noack in Paris, Bryan Pietsch in Seoul in London and Abigail Hauslohner and Brittany Shammas in Washington contributed to this report.