When politicians at the top of the empire can make Ukrainians Nazis and soldiers are apparently allowed to do whatever they want, it is easy to understand that TV presenters imagine that freedom of speech in inciting atrocities is unlimited, writes HS foreign correspondent Pekka Mykkänen.
Russia has committed about 40,000 individual war crimes in recent months in its war of aggression against Ukraine, Ukrainian prosecutors have said. Suspected war crimes include the large-scale destruction of civilian targets, rape, torture and indiscriminate executions.
By mid-October, Ukraine was according to his announcement identified 626 people from the Russian administration and military apparatus who are suspected of war crimes or other acts of aggression. In addition to soldiers and politicians, the list includes a category called “instigators of war and Kremlin propagandists”.
This category came under special scrutiny on Sunday, when the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba called for a worldwide ban on the Russian state television channel RT. According to him, the channel is guilty of “aggressive incitement to genocide”.
In his Twitter post, Kuleba linked a video from last Thursday’s RT broadcast, in which the director of the channel’s Russian-language broadcasts Anton Krasovsky talked in an amused tone about raping Ukrainian grandmothers. This task would belong to Russian soldiers.
Krasovski also said that Ukrainian children who opposed Moscow’s rule during the Soviet era should have been drowned in the river. He continued the idea by raving about how the Ukrainians living in the Carpathian mountains should be burned in their cabins. According to him, Ukraine “should not exist at all”.
When Krasovski’s comments began to spread on social media with English subtitles, one or the other reminded of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The Rwandan RTLM radio channel played a central part in the genocide, whose broadcasts even distributed killing instructions to the perpetrators of the genocide.
Emeritus Professor of International Law at the University of Helsinki Martti Koskenniemi reminds how three representatives of RTLM were sentenced at the UN war crimes court to long prison sentences for, among other things, inciting genocide, i.e. mass destruction.
“‘Immediate and public incitement to mass destruction’ is also a crime,” Koskenniemi says, referring to Article 3 of the Genocide Convention signed in 1948.
However, Koskenniemi says in his reply via email that “I cannot here take a position on whether Russian journalists or other employees of the media are guilty of the incitement referred to in the agreement”.
Russian In the last few months, the media has published a startling amount of speech in which Ukrainians are abused with violence and dehumanized. A recent radio personality Sergei Mardanin in the program, the guest called Ukrainians mentally ill Russians, “spiritual transvestites” who will be cured as long as Russia wins the war.
An American reporter observing the Russian media Julia Davis characterized the ideas presented in Mardan’s program as “genocidal denial of Ukrainian identity”.
In the opinion of the Ukrainian government, Russia is committing genocide in its war of aggression, for which a separate international court should be established. Also the governments, parliaments or leading politicians of many countries, for example in the Baltic countries, have called Russia’s warfare a genocide or “genocide-like actions”.
However, according to Koskenniemi, genocide, i.e. mass destruction, is a difficult and difficult to interpret crime title for the Russian war of aggression.
“[Joukkotuhonnalla tarkoitetaan] ‘an act which aims at the extermination of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in this capacity either in whole or in part.’ What is essential – and problematic – here is the purpose of destruction. Can it be said that the goal of Russian warfare is the aforementioned destruction? Maybe not”, Koskenniemi reflects.
Of course however, it appears that Russia’s goal is to force Ukraine to give up its independence by destroying the civilian population and its livelihood opportunities. The order for this has come from the highest level of power, i.e. the president From Vladimir Putin.
Russia’s military regime has not launched investigations into alleged crimes by its soldiers, fueling a culture of impunity and likely enabling more war crimes.
At least in the eyes of a layman, Putin can even be considered to have encouraged war crimes, because he gave the brigade that participated in the killing of civilians in the town of Butša last spring the honorific name of “guard”. Regarding the soldiers who bombed the city of Mariupol to the ground, he said: “In our minds, in the minds of everyone in Russia, they are heroes.”
When politicians at the top of the empire can make Ukrainians Nazis in the grip of Satanism and soldiers are apparently allowed to do whatever they want, it is easy to understand that TV presenters and journalists imagine that freedom of speech in inciting atrocities is unlimited.
Or imagine?
On Monday was reportedthat the director of the RT channel Margarita Simonyan had condemned Anton Krasovski, who had raped Ukrainian grandmothers and drowned children, last week. According to Simonjan, Krasovski’s words were “disgusting”.
At this point, it is pure speculation that Simonja was scared of equating his TV channel with mass media producing genocide talk. Or did it happen more simply that the boundaries of good taste, which were searched for a long time and with an aggressive attitude, were also found in the Russian state media.
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