IS IT yet genocide? Is this what we’re watching take shape in Ukraine? A genocide in Europe at the hands of the Russian army?

Certainly, Putin has unleashed his atrocity battalions against the Ukrainian people. There are reports of Ukrainians being rounded up and forcibly deported to Russia, where they’ve been held in concentration camps and turned into slave labourers.

We’re in the fog of war. The truth will only slowly emerge. But unquestionably Putin has carried out war crimes: schools and hospitals bombed; Mariupol obliterated – Groznyfied, Aleppoed; shelters where the world “children” was written in huge letters to deter attack were deliberately shelled. There have been rapes and murders carried out by Russian soldiers; Ukrainian officials have been kidnapped.

Genocide is rightly humanity’s most taboo word: it’s our greatest crime. It should never be used lightly. But we must listen to victims when they speak, and Ukrainian leaders – from President Zelensky down – accuse Russia of genocide.

Putin’s army treats Ukrainians as sub-human. This is the seed of genocide: the removal of your enemy’s humanity. People are being rounded up by soldiers, put on trains and sent to camps and made to work. We’ve seen this before in Europe; we’re still stained with it to this day.

Olha Stefanishyna, a Ukrainian deputy prime minister, says explicitly that she believes genocide is happening. She made the chilling point that “the number of civilian victims is far more than those from the armed forces of Ukraine”.

Zelensky accused Russia of genocide after Putin’s forces began their campaign of bombing hospitals. Such attacks, he said, were “the final proof … that genocide of Ukrainians is taking place.” Zelensky then pointed the finger at every European saying: “You saw. You know.”

Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Ludmila Denisova has also denounced Russia for acts of genocide, honing in on a tank attack on an elderly care home in which 56 people died. “This is another act of horrific genocide - the extermination of the civilian population of Ukraine,” she said.

A war crimes investigation is already underway by the International Criminal Court into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The language Putin has used to describe Ukraine is frankly monstrous. In February, during his meeting with France’s President Macron, Putin spoke directly of Ukraine saying: “Like it or not, take it, my beauty.” It’s the language of rape.

Putin is threatening Stalin-style purges and a new Great Terror against his own people if they’re deemed traitors. With his army failing to achieve its aims of quickly crushing Ukraine, the Kremlin is increasing its assault on innocent people hoping to break the country. There’s intelligence that Putin plans another false flag operation, which would pave the way for Russia to use chemical – or even biological or tactical nuclear weapons – against Ukrainian civilians.

Like Hitler before him, Putin is an international terrorist, capable of any atrocity now that his military has humiliated him. The west has stood by and watched genocide take place before. Just ask the dead of Rwanda or Bosnia.

Hard though it may be to take our eyes from the atrocities in Ukraine, we – the West – are collectively standing by while genocide rears up across the world: in Myanmar, in Tigray, in China – rendering hopes of Xi Jinping abandoning his Russian ally for the west absurd and degrading.

The Tigray region of Ethiopia is currently witness to some of the most barbaric war crimes on Earth, and fears have been raised that the conflict is now degenerating into something akin to genocide. Where is the talk of Tigray? Why are we in the West silent on this war?

In a rare act by a western power, the Biden administration has just declared that the Myanmar military has committed genocide against the Rohingya minority.

In China, there’s a welter of evidence to accuse the Communist Party of carrying out genocide against the Muslim Uighur community. On this crime, many nations in the West have spoken up. Parliaments in Canada, the Netherlands, Britain, Lithuania and France have all described China’s actions as genocide. But what do kind words mean when your people are rounded up, your culture exterminated?

Has our weak response to such sins emboldened Putin, unwittingly exacerbated atrocities in Ukraine?

The world is stumbling blind into a new era - Russia has brought us to this point. The Ukrainian war likely won’t remain confined to Ukraine. We’re perhaps at the beginning of a conflict – between democracy and authoritarianism – which will inevitably reshape the world. Just as we did in 1918 and 1945, once this conflict ends – for it will end one day, even though that day might be far away – we will need to find new ways of governing the world.

After the First World War, the governments of the globe set up the weak and ineffectual League of Nations in the hope that it would act as a forum for discussion where peace would triumph over war. Hitler murdered the League of Nations.

The United Nations was its successor after the Second World War. Who can now say that the UN is fit for purpose? It has failed and failed again. Its principal weakness is the Security Council, controlled by the victors of 1945: France, Britain, Russia, America, plus China. With such a divided membership, the UN can take no united decision.

Clearly, if Nato intervenes to protect the Ukrainian people, we risk nuclear Third World War. So should UN peacekeepers not be mandated to step in, creating safe havens and humanitarian corridors, enforcing no-fly zones, placing themselves between soldiers and civilians? Russia couldn’t go to war against the rest of the world in the shape of the United Nations. Who - quite literally on Earth - wouldn’t see that as a workable solution? But it cannot happen, because the UN is a dark joke.

After war, rubble has to be cleared away and rebuilding must begin. When this conflict ends – whatever the historians may call it years from now – the UN should be part of the cleaning up exercise, and a new body created in its place so we refashion how we govern this world in a way that’s fit for the remainder of the 21st century.

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