Fran Hirsch Profile picture
Apr 5 11 tweets 4 min read
The RIA-Novosti article--a horrifying treatise for #genocide--is a ramped-up and developed version of a "plan" for "deukrainization" advocated by the Russian economist and publicist Mikhail Khazin back in 2016.
Chilling to re-read Khazin's "vision" for a divided Ukraine. He had called for the transformation of Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy into "agricultural hinterland stripped of industry and armed forces" with "excess population" deported to Russia's Far East.
Khazin had suggested that there would likely be "several million" Ukrainians who "cannot be reformed" and who would "need to be partly terminated, and partly expelled."
There were a bunch of articles about this at the time in the Western press--including a brilliant one by Alexander Motyl asking "Is Russia Planning a Major Land War against Ukraine."

atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainea…
Of course, that brutal war is now in progress.
RIA-Novosti is a state-run media outlet.

Today's article calling for deukrainization--calling for genocide--must be taken seriously as a signal of Russia's plans and policies.
This call for "deukrainization" should make it clear that Russian atrocities in Bucha and other regions are not isolated incidents.
Russia's war on Ukraine must be understood as a war with genocidal intentions.
The international response must include robust and decisive measures for genocide prevention.

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More from @FranHirsch

Apr 5
In his closing speech at the #Nuremberg Trials in 1946, British chief prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross used the term #genocide to describe the Nazis’ “deliberate and systematic plan” to wipe out peoples and cultures.
Shawcross revisited the evidence about the Einsatzgruppen and Auschwitz.

But he also reminded the Tribunal that #genocide had not been limited to the murder of Jews and Gypsies.
Shawcross emphasized that the Nazis had pursued genocide “in different forms” in Poland, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Alsace-Lorraine.
Read 10 tweets
Apr 4
Yes, the word genocide was indeed created to describe what is now transpiring in Ukraine. And the term totalitarianism was invented to describe the kind of regime that is now in place in Russia.
To me, this much is obvious.

We've seen it before. I've spent my career as a historian studying it.
Yes, we will need war crimes trials and a new #Nuremberg to try the Putin regime, Putin's generals, and rank-and-file Russian soldiers.
Read 4 tweets
Apr 3
Crimes against humanity as defined in the #Nuremberg Principles of 1946
"Atrocities and offenses, including but not limited to murder, extermination, deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, or other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population…”
Russia hasn't broken "western" rules of law. It has violated universal principles.

These were principles that the jurists and diplomats in the Russian Empire and in the Soviet Union had once had a major role in formulating.
Read 4 tweets
May 23, 2021
On the morning of May 23, 1946, Soviet assistant prosecutor Nikolai Zorya was found dead in his hotel room in #Nuremberg. Zorya, below, had presented key parts of the Soviet case.
Zorya’s death was reported to Moscow as a suicide. In Nuremberg, the Soviets put forward another story: Zorya had accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun.
No one really believed that Zorya’s death was an accident—especially in the wake of the public exposure of the secret protocols to the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact.
Read 10 tweets
May 22, 2021
On May 22, 1946 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a full transcript of the secret protocols to the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) of 1939, accompanied by an article by the paper’s #Nuremberg correspondent Richard L. Stokes.
Stokes explained that this “purports to be the authentic text of the famous ‘Secret Protocol’ for partitioning Poland and disposing of the Baltic states which was signed by Foreign Commissar V. M. Molotov and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop at Moscow on... Aug. 23, 1939.”
Stokes further noted: “It is followed by an amendment transferring Lithuania to Russia with recompense for Germany in Poland which the same statesmen executed at Moscow on Sept. 28, 1939.”

Image of Molotov and Ribbentrop at the September 1939 meeting.
Read 12 tweets
May 20, 2021
On May 20 in #Nuremberg the Soviets finally had the chance to cross-examine Admiral Erich Raeder. Deputy chief prosecutor Yuri Pokrovsky (below) approached the witness box and began to challenge the defendant’s claims to have favored a peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union.
Hadn’t Raeder known in 1940 that Hitler was planning to attack Russia? Pokrovsky began. No, Raeder responded. Hitler had not said that he wanted to go to war, just that the German military must “be prepared.”
Pokrovsky then handed Raeder part of the memorandum that he had produced for the NKVD while in Soviet custody in Moscow: his “Moscow Statement.” Pokrovsky asked Raeder to read a highlighted passage aloud.
Read 13 tweets

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