On this day in 1948, the international community adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to prevent a recurrence of the terrible atrocities committed by the Nazi regime.

Three crimes of genocide have occurred on Ukrainian soil in the past hundred years—the Holodomor genocide of 1932-1933, the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944, and the Holocaust. We bow our heads in memory of the millions of victims of these terrible atrocities of the Nazi and communist totalitarian regimes.

For the second time in a hundred years, the Ukrainian people are becoming victims of the crime of genocide—in 1932-1933, the Soviet authorities tried to destroy Ukrainians during the Holodomor, and now the Kremlin regime is trying to do the same in the course of a genocidal war of aggression against Ukraine.

Russia is committing all the actions envisaged by the Genocide Convention: from incitement to the destruction of Ukrainians as a national group in mass media to the killing of Ukrainians simply because they are Ukrainians, attacks on critical infrastructure, the forcible transfer of Ukrainian children and their assimilation, ideological indoctrination and transmission to adoptive Russian families.

Russia is also resorting to a cynical distortion of the purpose of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It launched a full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, under the pretext of allegedly “protecting the Russian-speaking population,” relying on baseless and absurd accusations that Ukraine is allegedly committing genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine, in particular the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

In order to protect its interests and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, on the second day of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine filed a case to he International Court of Justice under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The International Court of Justice issued an Order that not only denied the baseless accusations, but also obliged Russia to immediately cease the military actions that began on February 24, 2022. Since then, Ukraine, together with its partners, has already successfully passed the first stage of the case.

The international community did not adopt the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide so that other states could abuse its provisions and start wars under the far-fetched pretext of “preventing the crime of genocide.”

Our common duty is to make every effort to ensure that all those guilty of past and present crimes of genocide are justly punished.