russia has been preparing the genocide of Ukrainians for years, dehumanizing them — Ukrainian Crisis Center
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The Russian authorities have been preparing for their genocide in Ukraine for years, using one of the tools of propaganda — dehumanization.
The head of the hybrid threat analysis group of the Ukrainian Crisis Center Oleksandra Tsekhanovska discussed this with Hromadske Radio.
She confirms that in the territories previously and currently under occupation — including Kherson, Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol — we see the apogee of the violence that modern Ukraine has suffered from Russia. However, it cannot happen so easily and suddenly without certain preparations, which must be long and systematic.
Tsekhanovska adds that dehumanization has several stages. The first is the creation of social distance, which involves the gradual and long-term restriction of the activities of victims of dehumanization in all spheres of life. The second stage is depopulation, which includes a gradual change in rhetoric, which leads to an increase in the level of hatred towards a certain social group.
Oleksandra Tsekhanovska ensures that the Russians are now in the third stage of dehumanization — destruction. Russian propaganda presents Ukrainians as a dangerous social group that needs to be destroyed.
«Something unpleasant also becomes dangerous — something that threatens you and your family. At this point, there is not only a normalization of violence, but violence also becomes the right way of treating a dehumanized group. That is, these people, who are not people, must be destroyed. That’s how Bucha appeared,» she explains.
According to the findings from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, no less than 461 people died at the hands of the Russians during the Russian occupation in the city of Bucha, Kyiv Oblast. In total, the occupiers killed 1,137 people in the Bucha and its surrounding areas.
