The reason for Putin's genocide is obvious

It is rooted in Russia's impunity for Soviet crimes

In the summer of 1941, when the whole world first learned of the mass murders that followed the Nazi invasion of the USSR, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared: "We are dealing with a nameless crime."
In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention, largely based on the visionary efforts of Lviv-born lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide." He assumed that crimes committed on a state scale should not go unpunished. And he warned that impunity would be seen as an invitation to new crimes. If crimes against humanity are not punished, they will be repeated, writes Oleksandr Hara for the Atlantic Council.
In giving the definition of genocide, Lemkin highlighted the crimes committed by the Soviet regime in Ukraine. He called the Kremlin's systematic efforts to destroy the Ukrainian nation "a classic example of Soviet genocide." The central event of the USSR's genocidal campaign in Ukraine was the killing of more than four million Ukrainians by artificial starvation in the early 1930s.
The Soviet authorities suffered almost no negative consequences as a result of this unprecedented massacre. Indeed, only a few months after the height of the famine, the USA officially recognized the USSR. The outside world simply refused to listen to a handful of brave voices, such as British journalist Gareth Jones, who tried to shed light on the apocalyptic reality of the famine.
Instead of becoming famous for his discoveries, Jones endured the embarrassing attacks of his fellow international correspondents. The loudest voice was Walter Duranty, the Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times. It speaks volumes for how little we know about the fact that this disgraced accomplice to genocide is still a Pulitzer Prize winner despite calls to have the prize taken away posthumously.
Since regaining independence in 1991, Ukrainians have broken the shackles of Soviet censorship and documented the full extent of the Holodomor. In the post-Soviet era, awareness of genocide by hunger grew, which contributed to a broader reassessment of the country's totalitarian past.
But this cannot be said about modern Russia. Far from recognizing the famine as an act of genocide, Moscow continues to downplay or deny the USSR's crimes against humanity. Meanwhile, Putin sought to rehabilitate the entire Soviet era and built a modern Russian national identity around a cult-like reverence for the USSR's role in defeating Nazi Germany. Attempts to condemn the mass murders of the Soviet regime are now routinely dismissed as unpatriotic and anti-Russian, and Stalin himself is again openly praised as a great leader.
Given Russia's complete unwillingness to take responsibility for its past crimes, it is no wonder that these crimes are now being repeated. As Lemkin feared, impunity paved the way for a new era of crime.
The ideological foundations of today's genocide were first laid after the Ukrainian Orange Revolution in 2004. This Ukrainian pro-democracy uprising became a turning point for the post-Soviet space. Many in Moscow accepted this with horror, seeing in it the next phase of the retreat of the Russian Empire, which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
In response, Putin engaged in an increasingly open confrontation with the West, seeking to restore Russian power throughout the post-Soviet space. In the years following the Orange Revolution, the Kremlin developed the concept of a "Russian world," meaning a community of people outside of modern Russia, bound by common bonds of language, culture, and religion, who are loyal to Moscow.
As the concept of the "Russian world" developed, government officials and proxies of the regime in Moscow began to directly question the legality of the collapse of the USSR and deny the events of 1991. It was increasingly common to hear prominent figures publicly deny the sovereignty and national identity of the former Soviet republics or completely abandon the idea of an independent Ukraine.
This brazen imperial appeal has been actively promoted in the Russian media space for more than a decade, from blockbusters and TV documentaries to texts and public holidays. Kremlin troll factories flooded social media with revisionist historical narratives justifying Russian expansionism, while an endless parade of Kremlin-sponsored political talk shows prepared the Russian public for the coming genocide.
An important turning point in these efforts was the publication of Putin's essay "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" in the summer of 2021. This historically illiterate tract of 5,000 words was widely interpreted as a declaration of war on Ukrainian statehood. The Russian dictator used the text to reiterate his belief, as it is often said, that Russians and Ukrainians are "one nation". And also, to say that most of modern Ukraine occupies historical Russian land. At the end, he issued a somewhat veiled threat, declaring: "I am sure that the true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia."
Despite this public preparation for genocide, some observers were unprepared for the atrocities that followed the Russian invasion in February 2022. In the weeks before the invasion, there were reports of detailed Russian plans for mass internment, concentration camps, and hit lists. These warnings were widely dismissed as implausible, but they turned out to be all too accurate.
The scale of Russian crimes over the past six months, as before, is hard to fathom. Entire cities turned into ruins. Thousands of people were executed. Millions forcibly deported to Russia. The main infrastructure of the Ukrainian state is being methodically destroyed along with the cultural heritage. All national symbols and traces of Ukrainian identity are being destroyed in the territories under Russian occupation. The whole world is witnessing a textbook example of genocide unfolding in real time on the screens of smartphones and social networks.
The feeling of shock at the scale of Russian crimes is understandable. However, it is important to note that the known elements of this genocide have been taking place for a long time in the regions of Ukraine occupied by Russia since 2014. In the past eight years, Crimea and Donbas have become black holes from the point of view of human rights. These black holes are marked by the suppression of Ukrainian identity, language and history along with the physical displacement of Ukrainians and the arrival of citizens of the Russian Federation. Once again, impunity led to escalation.
The world is slowly understanding the genocide against the Russians in Ukraine. The parliaments of countries such as Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland recognized the Russian invasion as an act of genocide. Others are expected to follow suit. At the same time, the international community still feels considerable reluctance to stand up to Putin's Russia. Proponents of the policy of appeasement point to Moscow's nuclear arsenal and emphasize the need to maintain a dialogue with the Kremlin to solve a number of global problems. They argue that Russia is simply too big and too important to be isolated.
This emphasis on compromise rather than confrontation creates the risk of further undermining international security. If Moscow manages to avoid justice for committing genocide in Ukraine, other authoritarian regimes are likely to see this as a green light. China will especially carefully monitor the reaction of the democratic world to the Russian invasion and draw the necessary conclusions for its foreign policy.
It is now painfully clear that the failure to hold the USSR accountable in 1991 was a colossal mistake. A Nuremberg-style trial exposing Soviet-era crimes could ease the post-Soviet transition to democracy and prevent Russia's return to authoritarianism under Putin.
This is why it is even more important that Putin and his accomplices face justice now. Even if they remain in power and beyond the reach of international law, nothing prevents the civilized world from judging them in absentia.
This will send a clear signal to the Russian people and authoritarian regimes around the world that the era of impunity for crimes against humanity is over.

Genocide is no longer a crime without a name. On the contrary, the world community officially recognizes genocide as the most serious of all crimes. However, this did not prevent today's Russia from planning and carrying out a genocidal invasion in front of everyone. Moscow's courage owes much to the sense of impunity created by the complete lack of responsibility for the crimes of the Soviet regime. The world cannot allow itself to repeat the same mistake.