Putin's Genocidal Tendencies

One year into all-out war in Ukraine and it’s clear that Garry Kasparov was right all along: “Vladimir Putin and the enemies of the free world must be stopped.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on a working trip to Lviv, Jan. 11, 2023. Photo courtesy of the Ukrainian Presidential Office.

By Michael Judge

TFP launched just weeks before Vladimir Putin’s murderous and misguided Feb. 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine. This week we recognize the one-year anniversary of that strategic blunder and the great heroism and resilience of the Ukrainian people.

In the past 12 months, TFP, along with millions around the globe, have been given a crash course on Russia’s genocidal history in Ukraine and the Kremlin’s continued desire to stamp out not only the Ukrainian people’s independence, but also their language, their literature, their art—indeed, the very culture that defines them as a separate nation.

This genocidal instinct is, as the Ukrainian novelist, poet, and essayist Oksana Zabuzhko recently wrote in The New York Times, a “monstrously enlarged version of the Ukrainian purges of the 1970s” when “those who dared to speak Ukrainian in public could be …