You're clearly located in the B and D categories of western useful idiot genocide apologists. Here's how you're lost in Whataboutistan:
"This isn't genocide": I can recommend a good lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, whose word is defined in the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide:
"as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group."
The key is intention, proclaimed multiple times by Putin and his mouthpieces on Russian TV and in Ria Novosti: Ukraine isn't a real country and doesn't exist. Ukrainians and Ukraine-ness don't exist and any Ukrainian who says so is a Nazi to be "lustrated" (purged), according to Solovyev, Medvedev, Timofey Sergytsev, DPR leader Pavel Gubarev and many others in the Russian state and media.
#1: "intent to destroy" Ukraine and Ukrainian identity and language. Box ticked from Putin's July 2021 "essay" and by Medvedev, Lavrov, Peskov, Timofey Sergeytsev in Ria Novosti (see memri.org for his genocidal screed: https://www.memri.org/reports/russian-columnist-sergeytsev-ukranian-nazism-greater-threat-world-german-nazism.
By this definition Russia's war on Ukraine is Russia's second genocide against it in 90 years, the Holodomor being the first (according to Lemkin).
Cultural genocide is a subset of this intention-driven definition of genocide. Ask lawyer Lemkin if you don't believe me.
#2: "killing members of the group": Mass bombing of Mariupol, Severodonetsk, civilian infrastructure, massacres and mass graves in Bucha, Irpin, Izyum and too many locations to count. Legal box ticked.
#3: "imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group": The Russian empire's attempts to stamp out Ukrainian identity date from Peter and Catherine the Great, all the Alexanders, Nicholas I and II and Stalin (add the Crimean Tatars to this list). Putin's is just the latest.
#4 and #5: Mass deportations, filtration camps, separation of children from families and forced adoption into Russian families. One Russian soldier's wife told him to rape as many Ukrainian women as possible so they wouldn't have Ukrainian children.
"Putin doing the same thing the US does all the time":
Before you were born I was protesting against criminal US intervention in Vietnam and Central America and translating and compiling the applications for political asylum in Canada of Central American refugees. So I'm well acquainted with the atrocities caused by American hegemony in its near abroad. Here's the difference to get you out of Whataboutistan without getting lost:
The American empire never sought the erasure of Vietnam, Yemen, Iraq, El Salvador, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Brazil, Iran as states and societies independent from the US. Russia has openly and repeatedly proclaimed that it now seeks the erasure of Ukraine and Ukrainian identity. This genocidal land-based colonial empire openly proclaims its genocidal intentions and you refuse to listen to what is openly announced all over Russian TV, by Putin himself and carried out in Mariupol, Bucha, Irpin, Izyum, etc.
"Bias and prejudice explain why people care": I live in Latvia and Portugal and have lived 16 years in Italy, 17 in Latvia, 3 in Spain, two summers in France. Yes, I care more about what happens in Europe than in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Uighur Sinjiang, Tibet, Somalia, Syria, the Central African Republic, Algeria, Yemen. This is due to PROXIMITY, not bias and prejudice. The racial composition of these more remote places differs greatly. Your comment that bias and prejudice motivate me caring more about Ukraine implies an improbably diversified portfolio of racial bigotry. Does such bias motivate some who care more about Ukraine than Yemen? Certainly. But it's mostly about preserving the hard-won post-1945 and post cold war peace that Europe has prospered under American-sponsored collective security.
"nuclear blackmail": Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 after Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing its territorial integrity. Having no nukes, Ukraine is absolved of nuclear blackmail. Your comment implies a moral and geopolitical symmetry that isn't there. Again, since this is about a broken contract, get better legal advice after reading the Budapest Memorandum and Putin's early February 2022 promise that he had no intention of invading Ukraine.
"Ukraine banned the Russian": This is utter nonsense. Use of Russian in Ukraine is less limited than English in Quebec, Russian in Latvia, German in Alto Adige, Italy. I watched Zelenskiy's Servant of the People series entirely in Russian. It's Russia's murderous war that's erasing the Russian language in Ukraine, causing many mixed language families to switch to speaking only Ukrainian due to the visceral disgust for it caused by the war.
From the language policy in Ukraine wikipedia page:
"Language policy in Ukraine is based on its Constitution, international obligations, and since 16 July 2019 the Law of Ukraine "to ensure the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the State language". From 2012 until February 2018, the language policy of Ukraine was also based on Law on the Principles of the State language policy [uk] (before 2012, the 1989 Law on the Languages in the Ukrainian SSR was in force).[1] The Ukrainian language is the State language of Ukraine. According to the article 10 of the Constitution of Ukraine, the State has to ensure the comprehensive development and functioning of the Ukrainian language in all spheres of social life throughout the entire territory of Ukraine. Other languages spoken in Ukraine are guaranteed constitutional protection. Russian is recognized as the language of a national minority.[2]
A 2012 law, called the law "On the principles of the State language policy" gave the status of regional language to Russian and other minority languages. It allowed the use of minority languages in courts, schools and other government institutions in areas of Ukraine where the national minorities exceed 10% of the population.[3][4] The law was used mostly in Ukraine's southern and eastern regions, where predominant or significant parts of the population speak Russian as their first language.[4] Three minor settlements did the same for Hungarian, Moldovan and Romanian.[5] Ukrainian remained the only official country-wide language.[4] Introduction of the law was supported by the governing Party of regions and opposed by the opposition parties. According to its opponents, the law undermined and supplanted the role of the Ukrainian language, and violated Article 10 of the Ukrainian Constitution.[6][7][8] "
You're so lost in Whataboutistan that you unwittingly spout Putinist nonsense conflating Russian language with Russian national identity. My Latvian wife is a native speaker of Russian, but certainly not Russian. Same for her kids and two nephews. I speak four European languages with decent to full fluency (Italian, Spanish, French, Catalan) and four more conversationally (German, Russian, Latvian and Portuguese). By commenting on language use and policy in bilingual countries you're trespassing in utter ignorance on terrain I'm particularly expert in through personal experience.
The people greeting their liberators in Kherson, Izyum and Kupiansk all speak Russian. But they certainly are not Russian. Your comment accepts Putin's ethno-nationalist definition of who is Russian, which makes Russia's borders elastic and expandable. No Russian speakers in Narva, Daugavpils, Kherson and Kharkiv want Russian "protection", which is what your comment implies.
"far right Ukrainian nationalists": They got 2% of the vote in 2019. Far right nationalism is a far bigger problems in the USA, Brazil, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Hungary. Would that justify a Russian invasion of those countries?
"anti-Russification as long time far right propaganda":
Three centuries of forced Russification in Ukraine says otherwise:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification_of_Ukraine
I was in Barcelona in 1973 and 1974 when Catalan was still banned and in 1976 when the ban on Catalan was lifted. I've also seen stupid, statist Latvian government language policies and Spanish fascism's language prohibition as cultural genocide up close, and know the difference. You haven't and have no expertise or historical knowledge to distinguish the real thing from propaganda.
"war could have been avoided": Not until Russia separates its national identity from empire. Ask the Karelians, Kalmyks, Chechens, Tatars, Bashkiris, Dagestanis, Georgians, Buryats, Yakuts, Urals and the 100 other peoples subjugated by Russia's land-based colonial empire.
Your evidence-free comment exemplifies how those lost in Whataboutistan practice this sequence when responding to my evidence-based writing: ready, fire, aim. The Russian military fights in the same ready, fire, aim sequence, with the same results in Kharkiv, Izyum, Kupiansk and Kherson.
Thanks for helping me write the next Lost in Whataboutistan article.
