It was the French philosopher Voltaire who said, “History is the study of all the world’s crime.” To not understand the crimes of history will doom us to repeat them. Taking REEES 405.001, which focuses on the history of genocide in Ukraine, at the University of Michigan is not only critical to understanding the current Russo-Ukrainian War but also the lessons from the conflicts preceding it. REEES 405 is fully recommended to all students planning to pursue careers in international diplomacy, political science, sociology, and criminal justice.
On December 9th, 1948, the first human rights treaty, the Genocide Convention, was adopted. It was signed by 152 countries and became effective on January 12, 1951. Since then, prominent figures like Omar Al-Bashir, the former president of Sudan, and Slobodan Milošević, the former president of Yugoslavia, have been indicted for genocide.
An often misunderstood term, genocide was coined in 1944 by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. According to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide is defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Such acts can be indiscriminate killing, bodily harm, forcible transfer of children, and prevention of births within an aforementioned group.
With the February 24th, 2022, invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Ukrainian officials, like Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin, and American leaders, including former President Joe Biden have identified the attack as genocide. No official charges for genocide have been levied against Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia. President Vladimir Putin is widely seen as the instigator of the Russo-Ukrainian War after he led the Russian Federation to annex and occupy the Ukrainian province of Crimea back in 2014. After eight years of waging maritime conflicts and cyber attacks, as well as funding para-military rebellions in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, a region known as the Donbas, Putin formally invaded Ukraine.
However, Putin’s 2022 invasion is not the first recorded instance of a Russian state’s hostilities affecting Ukraine. In REEES 405.001, Professor Yurii Kaparulin is shedding light on Russia’s repeated history of mass crimes, and sometimes genocidal acts, against Ukraine. In his class, “The Crime of Genocide in the History of Ukraine (20-21st Centuries),” students learn about the examples of mass murders in Ukrainian history, like the Holodomor, the Great Terror, the Holocaust, and the deportation of Crimean Tatars. Moreover, REEES 405 extends into the modern day, covering current allegations of genocidal actions in Ukraine during the most recent invasion by the Russian Federation.
As the director of the Raphael Lemkin Center for Genocide Studies at Kherson State University, Kaparulin brings a first-hand experience and legal perspective on the actions taken against the Ukrainian people by the Russian Federation. While no action has been taken by the International Criminal Court to define whether recent Russian actions can be defined as genocide, there is an ongoing debate between legal scholars.
While it is unlikely that serious legal action will be taken in the near future against Putin and the Russian Federation, scholars like Yurii Kaparulin at the University of Michigan are shedding light on their actions and keeping the transfer of history alive.
