 Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addresses the U.N. Security Council in New York City via video link on April 5. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images) | At the end of his virtual address Tuesday to dignitaries at the U.N. Security Council, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky played a short video. Just over a minute long, it showed, in town after town, images of the corpses of slain Ukrainian civilians — some left to rot in the streets, others tossed into mass graves or crumpled into the ruins of their bombed-out homes. The video followed an angry set of remarks from Zelensky. He demanded the Security Council seek "full accountability" from Russia for its alleged war crimes in Ukrainian cities, but also called for wholesale reform of the U.N. body, which affords permanent member Russia veto power. Zelensky said the Security Council should dissolve itself "if there's nothing you can do besides conversation." The Ukrainian leader detailed the alleged atrocities visited upon his population by Russia, from rape to looting to indiscriminate slaughter. He stressed that the evidence of mass killings in the town of Bucha was likely just one instance of a campaign of violence unleashed across his country. "They killed entire families, adults and children, and they tried to burn the bodies," Zelensky said. "This undermines the whole architecture of global security," he added. "They are destroying everything." Russian officials and state media deny the reports of atrocities, describing them as "fake" and staged by Ukraine for propaganda purposes. But there is mounting evidence of Russian misdeeds compiled by independent observers and rights groups, as well as Ukrainian prosecutors and foreign governments, including the United States. On a visit to Bucha over the weekend, Zelensky said his nation was enduring an attempted "genocide." The question of "genocide" is a complicated claim, with the specific international legal definition of what counts as one often at odds with the more emotive invocations of activists and politicians. In a careful explainer, my colleague Claire Parker laid out what we know and don't know surrounding the charges of Russian war crimes. Per Claire, a 1948 legal convention defined genocide as a crime that "consists of killing, causing 'serious bodily or mental harm,' preventing births or forcibly transferring children of a group 'with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.' " "We are the citizens of Ukraine," Zelensky said on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "We have more than 100 nationalities. This is about the destruction and extermination of all these nationalities." On Tuesday, when facing the Security Council, Zelensky called for the creation of an inquiry and tribunal akin to what was staged in Nuremberg to prosecute Nazi war crimes after World War II. He said the Russian atrocities in some Ukrainian towns over the past month were things Nazis hadn't even carried out some eight decades ago. The grim irony is that Russia is the party more animated by invocations of Nazism. The war was launched amid a speech from Russian President Vladimir Putin that dismissed Ukraine's right to sovereignty, questioned its status as an independent nation and described the Russian campaign as one of "denazification." Six weeks into its invasion, Russia's pliant TV channels and state media still echo the feeble narrative that their country is ousting unwanted fascist elements that sit in Kyiv. And some even argue, seeing the resistance Ukrainians are putting up to Russian forces, that "denazification" requires a sweeping purge across the country. In an op-ed published Sunday in Russian state outlet RIA Novosti, Timofey Sergeytsev cast virtually the entire Ukrainian population as complicit in Kyiv's supposed "Nazism" and called for what would essentially be a generation-long occupation of the country, the "liquidation" of the Ukrainian state and its political elites and the consignment to forced labor of any "accomplices" of the Kyiv government. "Denazification is necessary when a significant part of the people — most likely the majority — has been mastered and drawn into the Nazi regime in its politics," the op-ed noted, implicitly suggesting that Ukrainian civilians were fair targets. "That is, when the hypothesis 'the people are good — the government is bad' does not work." Such language has underscored the argument that it's appropriate to discuss "genocide." "The rhetoric on its own was not enough for me, and the massacres on their own were not enough," said Eugene Finkel, a Holocaust scholar at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, to the Independent. "The threshold for me is the combination of this violence, widespread and deliberate, and the rhetoric. I think that is enough evidence." From his prison cell, prominent Russian dissident Alexei Navalny managed to get a Twitter thread published that denounced Russia's state mouthpieces for fueling the violence. "Propagandists create the kind of public opinion that no longer simply allows Putin to commit war crimes, but demands them of him," Navalny wrote. "Warmongers should be treated as war criminals," he added, working in a reference to the radio station that played a pivotal role in fomenting genocide in Rwanda. "From the editors in chief to the talk show hosts to the news editors, all of this Thousand Hills Radio should be sanctioned now and tried someday." In an interview with the New Statesman, Sergey Karaganov, an influential Russian political theorist who is close to the Kremlin, offered a more direct insight into its thinking. He scoffed at the notion that Zelensky, a Jew, could be a Nazi. But he suggested that Ukraine had only a "limited … history of statehood" and should be subject to partition. Even more darkly, Karaganov argued that the conflict now was "existential" for Russia as it is a "proxy war" with the entirety of the West. "Russia cannot afford to 'lose,' so we need a kind of a victory," he said. "And if there is a sense that we are losing the war, then I think there is a definite possibility of escalation." | 
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