In justifying his invasion of Ukraine last month, Russian president Vladimir Putin told his citizens the war was a “special military operation” intended to “demilitarise and de-Nazify” the neighbouring state and to protect pro-Russia separatists in the east of the country from genocide.
Accusing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, a Jew who lost family members in the Holocaust, of presiding over a “Nazi” government is an astonishing allegation and Ukraine was quick to file a lawsuit with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) arguing that Mr Putin was misusing the word “genocide”, coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 with a view to prosecuting the atrocities of the Third Reich, as a bogus pretext for his attack.
