You’re very welcome. It’s always a pleasure.

Ah, so they’re for different classes. That makes sense. I knew you were taking a couple of courses but wasn’t sure which work went with which one. Both topics could be covered in either, from different perspectives. You probably said, but I missed the significance.

One thing that might help… You’re probably going to have to define genocide before you can decide whether there has been one (or an attempt). If you do some of that definitional work now (to be returned to in more depth later), it might give you some clues as to what sources you’ll need to be looking into.

What counts as a primary source in history?

Law reports and legislation would count in some fields but I’m unsure, here. The University of Birmingham tells me ‘official reports’ count. The University of South Carolina tells me that ‘almost any kind of material can be used as a primary source as long as it was created during the time period that you are researching or was created by someone who participated’.

If law does count, I can think of a few options. The UN OHCHR report, ‘Accountability for killings in Ukraine from January 2014 to May 2016 (PDF)’ (or site with link/summary) includes several useful references, such as to the Ukrainian Constitution, international criminal law, and Ukrainian criminal law (that’s if the UN report isn’t a primary source in itself). This document doesn’t always make it clear who is doing the killing, so be careful if you rely on it.

Looks like Ukraine derogated from several international instruments over the past decade or so. There’s this, in relation to Russia’s taking Crimea (I found a link but it’s not necessarily the right one): Resolution of the Parliament of Ukraine ‘On derogation from certain obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (PDF))’ of 21 May 2015 (cited in the UN report, above). This may be the UN’s receipt (PDF)? And the Council of Europe (for the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms 1950 (ECHR), not the European Union) reported that Ukraine may derogate but ECHR standards still apply – there must be an official record somewhere, about what the news item refers to. You might have to go to the relevant websites (for Ukrainian Parliament, UN, European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR, related to the Council of Europe (coe) i.e. HUDOC) and browse by year to find things; searching is mysteriously unhelpful (imagine that).

It’s weasel-wordy and maybe too recent for a history paper, but there could be some useful links in this kind of thing: ‘Ukraine: UN rights office deplores attack in Russian-occupied Donetsk’.

Search HUDOC for ‘donetsk’ brings up some interesting cases. For example, in YS and OS v Russia (http/not secure link), a mother (Russian) left her husband (Ukrainian) and daughter in Donetsk. After the civil war started, the mother went back to Ukraine, ‘kidnapped’ her daughter, and moved to Russia. A Russian District Court ruled in favour of the husband, saying the daughter had to be returned under the ‘Hague Convention’. The ECtHR criticised the Russian court for failing to consider the ‘grave risk’ of ‘physical or psychological harm’ and ‘an intolerable situation’. The Russian court could, apparently,

• have easily … ascertained [the facts] by a wide number of sources, which had unanimously attested to serious human rights violations and abuses in eastern Ukraine of which Donetsk was part, including thousands of conflict related civilian casualties and deaths counting both adults and children, the vast majority of which had been caused by shelling, including from artillery and large-caliber mortars. Nor had the District Court assessed whether the circumstances pertaining in Donetsk at that time had been more than isolated incidents in an unsettled political environment to reach the threshold for “grave risk”. It had failed to consider the views of the second applicant expressed in a report by the chief inspector of the local childcare authority, which had mentioned, in particular, that she had been afraid to return because she had feared gunfire and exploding bombs.

(Quotes are from the summary (http/not secure site).)

All of this would be true even if Donetsk was ‘only’ in a horrid civil war (i.e. not suffering a genocide). But it’s interesting to see that the ECtHR knew how bad it was in Donetsk, and thought the Russian Court violated the mother’s and the daughter’s right to a private and family life for insufficiently ‘assess[ing] as to [the] existence of [a] “grave risk” in returning [an] abducted child under the Hague Convention to a conflict zone in eastern Ukraine’. (That’s the strange world of law: kidnap your own kid to save them from a war zone and you’ll still be counted as abducting them but can rely on your right to a private and family life to keep them safe! Baffling, but there you are.)

Some more cases, here (they won’t all be relevant): http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/#{“fulltext”:[“donetsk”],“documentcollectionid2”:[“GRANDCHAMBER”,“CHAMBER”]}

And searching ‘Luhansk’ reveals (again, not all the cases will be relevant): http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/#{“fulltext”:[“luhansk”],“documentcollectionid2”:[“GRANDCHAMBER”,“CHAMBER”]}

EDIT: I wasn’t finished typing!

EDIT #35 because I kept on clicking the wrong button after previewing the text!: There is one case that mentions ‘Donetsk’ and ‘genocide’ but I can’t work out easily if it’s connected in the way that you’re looking for (I don’t think so but it’s a long case about Russia banning Jehovah’s Witnesses and I’m not motivated enough to read it in depth): https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/?i=001-217535.

EDIT #39: The Foreign Policy Research Institute wrote a report, ‘Five Years of War in the Donbas’ in 2019. The FPRI talks of an ‘accidental’ civil war 😐 and talks explicitly of neo-nazism as Ukraine’s Achilles’ Heel. But JFC look at this:

Hopefully, the absorption of the volunteer units into the formal Ukrainian armed forces will serve to moderate their views, rather than infect the larger body with them. One OSCE monitor believes that this is starting to happen. She believes the Ukrainian military leadership has directed members of the former volunteer units to cut ties with—or at a minimum not publicly proclaim their association with—extreme right- wing groups. She says, “I can see Facebook profiles of soldiers of Azov. Last year [2018] they were posting to mark the birthday of Hitler, but this year it didn’t happen.”¹⁴⁷ While neglecting to congratulate Hitler on his birthday is small progress in cutting ties between these units and the far-right, it is progress nevertheless.

In other words, ‘Ukrainian neonazism is a problem because they’re open about it and it makes them look bad’.