Canadian Lawmakers Brand Russian Invasion of Ukraine a ‘Genocide’

Canada’s House of Commons on Wednesday adopted a motion to designate some of Russia’s recent military actions against Ukraine as “genocide,” Canada’s Global News website reported.

Heather McPherson, a far-left Canadian Member of Parliament (MP), “put forward a motion following question period seeking unanimous consent from all parties to recognize the [alleged] atrocities [by Russia against Ukraine] as a ‘genocide,'” Global News relayed on April 27.

The news website confirmed that the “motion was adopted,” while clarifying that a parliamentary motion “is not binding and does not carry direct consequences under broader international law, where the definition [of genocide] is laid out by the United Nations [U.N.] and its International Criminal Court.”

Canada’s House of Commons gave the motion its “unanimous consent” but did not hold “a formal parliamentary vote” on the matter, Global News further noted on Wednesday.

The atrocities allegedly committed by Russia against Ukraine since a war between the neighboring countries broke out on February 24 include the following, as stipulated by the Canadian House of Commons on April 27:

• Mass atrocities
• Systemic instances of willful killing of Ukrainian civilians and the desecration of corpses
• Forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to the Russian territory
• Torture and the imposition of life conditions causing grave suffering, and
• Widespread instances of physical harm, mental harm and rape.

MP McPherson claimed on April 27 that there was “clear and ample evidence of systematic and massive war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed against the people of Ukraine by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.” Despite the claim, McPherson did not provide any verification for the alleged evidence she cited while presenting the motion to Canada’s House of Commons.

McPherson is a member of Canada’s far-left New Democratic Party (NDP), which is a socialist federal political party. McPherson specifically serves as the NDP’s leader on foreign affairs in the Canadian House of Commons.

The leftist leader told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) on April 27 that she introduced the Russia-Ukraine “genocide” motion that day “as a way to push the [Canadian] Liberal government to take stronger actions against Russia, particularly through sanctions.”

“Sanctions have been implemented too slowly, they’ve been implemented very, very late, they’ve … given an opportunity for Russian oligarchs to hide their wealth so they have not been appropriate,” she said.

“From my perspective as a parliamentarian in the House of Commons, this is a tool to urge our government to do more,” McPherson told the Canadian public broadcaster. “This is a tool to say that the conflict in Ukraine is not over, that the support we’ve been providing has not been enough and we need to do more for the people of Ukraine.”

Canada’s government recently accused China’s ruling Communist Party of “genocide” over its treatment of Uyghurs (a largely Turkic-speaking, Sunni Muslim ethnic minority in China’s westernmost Xinjiang region). The designation joined a growing global consensus that designates Beijing’s actions against Uyghurs — the herding of millions into concentration camps, the forced sterilization of women and killing of babies, and the destruction of mosques, cemeteries, and historical sites — in Xinjiang as “genocide.” Canada in mid-February also deemed its own government guilty of the “genocide” of Native Americans in past decades.

The U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines “genocide” as an act “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

“Indeed, this is genocide,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on April 3 of Russia’s military actions in Ukraine since February 24. Zelensky claimed he and his fellow Ukrainians were “being destroyed and exterminated.”

U.S. President Joe Biden deemed some of Russia’s military actions against Ukraine as “genocide” on April 12. Biden’s use of the term “genocide” marked an escalation of his administration’s prior rhetoric on the war, as U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters just eight days earlier on April 4, “We have not yet seen a level of systematic deprivation of life of the Ukrainian people to rise to the level of genocide.”

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on April 13 clarified that while Biden did refer to Russia’s recent actions against Ukraine as “genocide” one day earlier, “of course there will be a legal process that plays out in the courtroom.” Psaki referred to a necessary legal process that would accompany a formal investigation into allegations of genocide during the latest Russia-Ukraine war.

Asked by a reporter at the April 13 press briefing what “the President [Biden] [saw], what did he hear in the days between saying they were simply ‘war crimes’ and then this is actual ‘genocide,'” Psaki replied, “[W]e’ve also seen, I think, from the beginning of this, Kremlin rhetoric and Russian media deny the national identity of the Ukrainian people. And the Kremlin has launched a full-scale assault on the sovereignty of the Ukrainian state and its people.”

The White House press secretary seemed to refer to a series of nationally televised addresses Russian leader Vladimir Putin delivered in the days leading up to what he described as the launch of a “special military operation” in neighboring Ukraine on February 24. The action occurred just three days after the Kremlin announced plans to recognize the independence of two Russian-backed separatist states in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region known as the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR).

Putin has denied the existence of Ukrainian as a true nationality, doing so shortly before the February invasion began. Putin said at the time that Russian inhabitants of the DPR and the LPR are not of a separate ethnic identity, i.e. Ukrainian, but are ethnic Russians on the wrong side of a relatively modern border imposed on Russia when the nation of Ukraine was created upon the dissolution of the former Soviet Union.

“I would like to emphasise again that Ukraine is not just a neighbouring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space. These are our comrades, those dearest to us – not only colleagues, friends and people who once served together, but also relatives, people bound by blood, by family ties,” Putin said in a nationally televised address on February 21.

“It should be noted that Ukraine actually never had stable traditions of real statehood. And, therefore, in 1991 it opted for mindlessly emulating foreign models, which have no relation to history or Ukrainian realities,” Putin further stated in the speech.