I generally support Macron on most things, but to say that Ukraine and Russia are "brothers" has as much validity as saying that Jews and Arabs, which are both Semitic peoples, are brothers.
The relationship between the Russia and Ukraine has never been particularly happy, in my understanding. In the 17th and much of the 18th Century, the Zaporhozian Host were willing to dance to the Sultan's fiddle for a while just to keep from having to live under Russian serfdom, which was always a cruel system designed to break the spirit of a people. The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church continues to maintain an anathema on Ivan Mazepa, who is, to some in Ukraine, a cultural hero.
The people of what is now Ukraine continued to have uprisings against serfdom during the 19th Century, and by the 20th Century, they were so fed up with the Russians that they preferred to get behind Nestor Makhno's anarcho-communist ideas and the surrounding Makhnovshchina rather than wholeheartedly join with the Bolsheviks.
Refusal to submit to the Bolsheviks after the revolution was part of what led to the Holodomor, which really was deadly enough to be called a genocide. If you have never heard of the Holodomor, you have heard of it now. It was an artificially induced famine that significantly depleted the population of Ukraine, hitting the almost entirely indigenous peasant class of Ukraine particularly hard.
The fact that the Russian government is now leveling Ukrainian cities with ridiculous loss of civilian lives in order to try to terrorize the Ukrainian government into submission is just another of many crimes in an abusive relationship that stretches back centuries.
To use the word "genocide" to describe what the Russian government is doing is not excessively extreme, but it lacks only for precision. Even that lack is only out of want of a better word. The crimes would not be as outrageous, although still very much on the scale of the mass slaughter of civilians, if not for the fact that the Russian government is only perpetuating the systematic bullying of Ukraine that has gone on for centuries. The only part that Ukraine has ever had in that abuse was to refuse to genuflect to the motherfuckers. They have always objected, and they still object. They have always been right to object, and Russia's policy of domineering aggression toward Ukraine has always deserved the hostile contempt and revulsion of the entire civilized world.
With relatives like Russia, who needs enemies? If the word "genocide" is inadequate for want of precision, then it is time to coin a new word that answers better to the task of describing the situation. If we imagined that Russia and Ukraine were individual human beings, it would be like a man that has spent years making unwanted advances upon a woman, raped her several times, and pretended to own her while she really raised his offspring, which was the product of those rapes, entirely based on her own resources. Even when she and her offspring were starving and sick, which cost the life of one of those offspring, he did nothing whatsoever support even his own spawn, and there is actually evidence that he engineered those hardships in order to punish her for a perceived slight.
Now that she has finally decided to marry a man that respects her and who has treated her children with the love, affection, and support of a natural father, the monstrous brute that conceived them is moving in to claim the legitimacy of the relationship, based on nothing more than the fact that he signed the birth certificate of the first one (and only the first one), and furthermore, the motherfucker demands she submit to an archaic form of coverture that would effectively erase her legal identity as an independent human being.
When she refused to truckle when he stormed in to batter her and instead stuck him with a meat cleaver and told him to piss off and never darken her doorstep again, he took over an auxiliary building on the property and continues to maintain the narrative that he is really the master of the household and that they are really a loving couple that is only having one of their rare fights, and surely, she will soon "comes to her senses."
Meanwhile, she has a shotgun trained on the building, and she is on the phone desperately asking her real fiance to do more to help the situation, and her fiance is doing as much as he can to help her in this situation without running afoul of the uncertain and unusual legal situation regarding the property.
Now, if we translate that to a dispute between nations, the word "genocide" is indeed appropriate in terms of emotional weight, but an act of genocide is more like the equivalent of running someone over with a truck in an attempt to murder them and thereby putting them into an ICU for a lost year of their lives. This crime is, in one respect, seemingly of less acute severity, but when taken into context with the ongoing and systematic abuse, it is also more desperately vile.
The word "genocide" is the only term that has adequate emotional weight for the sheer degree of internationally united revulsion that the perpetrator deserves. I propose that we use it as a stand-in term for now and invent a new term for profoundly ugly abuse between nations later.
Furthermore, any government that has ever subjected a foreign people to oppressive serfdom for the overtly and boastfully expressed purpose of rendering them spineless should not be given indefinite license only because they have changed their pretenses. The fact that the Russian government no longer claims to live under a Tsar and no longer acknowledges that they keep their people living under a form of serfdom barely better than slavery (in fact worse than slavery as practiced by less ruthless cultures) is not something we ought to give any credit whatsoever. Soviet communism was nothing more than the renaming and expansion of serfdom, and they did nothing by it except to ruin the good name of a system of economic justice that I would otherwise proudly proclaim as being related to my own philosophy. Fuck them.
