The UN’s top court has said it has jurisdiction to hear a case brought against Russia by Ukraine.
Kyiv brought the case at The Hague-based International Court of Justice (ICJ), days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Kyiv accuses Moscow of falsely using genocide law to justify its brutal invasion which continues.
Russia says it intervened in Ukraine to prevent a genocidal attack on ethnic Russians in the eastern Donbas region.
Ukrainian representative Anton Korynevych welcomed the decision.
“It is important that the court will decide on the issue that Ukraine is not responsible for some mythical genocide which the Russian Federation falsely alleged that Ukraine… has been committing since 2014 in Donbas,” he said.
While the case centres on the 1948 Genocide Convention, Kyiv does not accuse Moscow of committing genocide in Ukraine.
Instead, it says Russia violated the genocide treaty by resorting to it to justifying the invasion.
Ukraine maintains there was no risk of genocide in the east of the country, where it had been fighting Russian-backed forces since 2014.
It adds that the genocide treaty does not, in any case, permit an invasion to stop an alleged genocide.
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