European Union: Complicity in an Interethnic Conflict or Forced Assimilation into the Russian Federation?
The current campaign in the European Union to return Ukrainian men of conscription age is not migration policy — it is an institutional attempt at complicity in ethnic cleansing. Because representatives of national minorities of Ukraine are able to obtain legal status in the countries of their ethnic origin, the practical effect of this political campaign falls solely on ethnic Ukrainians.
This indicates that ethnic Ukrainians themselves are the focus of these measures, especially given that the existence of ethnic Ukrainians as a distinct national group is not even recognized not only by Russia, but even by Ukraine itself.
We, as representatives of the Ukrainian ethnic community, sincerely hope that all of these questions and concerns will be carefully considered before any decision is made. We hope that clear answers exist for each of them and that the consequences will be fully assessed in advance, so that no institution, government, or individual later finds themselves accused of complicity in outcomes that could and should have been foreseen.
There are three irresolvable problems with any attempt to return Ukrainian men to Ukraine:
The first problem: where are men from occupied territories to be returned to?
The second: how do they imagine separating families when a couple lives together, for example, with children or without children?
The third: who will medically determine whether these men are fit for military service, and under whose jurisdiction will that decision be made?
- Will they deny protection even to those who have lost an arm or a leg or have other critical medicall conditions?
- Are they going to separate the husband from his wife and children, or how exactly do they imagine this?
- And then the wife and children will be forced to return to Ukraine as a sign of solidarity with the husband, where they will all be killed together?
- And would this not be considered as genocide?
- How will this be established legally?
- How can a family be separated legally without violating national, international, and humanitarian law, as well as any moral principles?
- How is this even realistic?
- How can a person be returned to Bakhmut, Kostiantynivka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk, Mariupol, and other cities?
- Or how can a person be returned to an occupied territory?
- Would this not be considered forced assimilation into "russians"?
- If ethnic Ukrainians have been deprived of their status as a people — a collective subject of the right to self-determination — and are instead treated merely as “citizens” or as a “mobilization resource” of a controlled state, would the forced return of men to combat zones or occupied territories not constitute an act of complicity in colonial occupation and an element of genocide or ethnic cleansing?
- If a legal derogation from human rights obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is in force throughout Ukraine — meaning that most human rights guarantees have been officially suspended or restricted — then on what basis can Ukraine be considered safe for the return of the population?
- Would the forced return of a population to a zone of interethnic conflict not constitute a form of complicity in the ongoing interethnic conflict in Ukraine, in addition to the Russian aggression, since it creates the conditions for people to be drawn once again into a confrontation from which they were previously forced to flee?
- Under which norms of international law are ethnic Ukrainians, who are not recognized as part of a sovereign people possessing rights to land and sovereignty in Ukraine, obligated to defend that territory, and on what legal basis does Ukraine mobilize them and compel them to swear allegiance to a foreign sovereign and a foreign people to which they no longer legally belong?
- Or what exactly is the plan?
- Will there be specially prepared concentration camps for those who are returned?
- Or how is all of this supposed to work?
We, Ukrainians, are fleeing more the repressive state apparatus of Ukraine, not the war itself, because an interethnic conflict is being concealed behind that apparatus and financed by the European Union without any human rights conditions, only for those who escaped it to later be denied protection and forced back into the same environment, thereby creating a closed cycle of complete or partial destruction.
Whether intentional or not, such a decision to restrict the right of Ukrainian men to remain in the European Union may violate Articles I, II(c), and III(e) of the Genocide Convention, as Article I establishes the duty to prevent genocide, Article II(c) prohibits the deliberate infliction of living conditions capable of bringing about the physical destruction of a protected group in whole or in part, and Article III(e) prohibits complicity in genocide.
