75 years ago, on December 9, 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The document, which established the legal definition of genocide for the first time, became the international community's response to the tragic and horrific experience of the Second World War. One of the main objectives of the Convention is to prevent such crimes in the future.

The deliberate extermination of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such is the worst possible crime against humanity. The history of mankind has many such tragedies.

In the history of the Ukrainian people, this is the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine and the ongoing armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.

The political and ideological narratives of the “Stalinist era” - the denial of Ukraine's existence as an independent state - are fully cosplayed by the incumbent Kremlin regime. After all, the goals of Russia's ongoing war against Ukraine and the genocide of 1932-1933 are identical - the destruction of the Ukrainian nation and its statehood.

By continuing to kill Ukrainian civilians, attack critical infrastructure, destroy historical and cultural heritage, and forcibly abduct Ukrainian children to change their status and indoctrinate them, Russia is waging an unprovoked war against Ukrainian identity. This entire spectrum of crimes has been widely practiced by the Putin’s regime in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine since the beginning of the aggression in 2014.

On the International Day of Commemoration of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide, honoring their human dignity and prevention of such crimes, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine recalls the international legal obligations of the states to cooperate to prevent and suppress genocide, as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes, and calls on the international community to resolutely increase pressure on the Kremlin regime, to continue providing military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, to help ensure that all those involved in crimes against Ukraine and Ukrainians are brought to justice, to provide maximum assistance in the return of illegally deported and forcibly displaced Ukrainian children and the release of civilian hostages, political prisoners and prisoners of war.

It is our common duty to do everything possible to ensure that the genocide remains only a tragic instructive lesson in history that the world will always remember but will never allow to happen again.

For reference: The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 9, 1948. Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious 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 is lawyer Rafał Lemkin, who received his law degree from the Jan Kazimierz University of Lviv.