In brief: International law can punish attacks on cultural sites but struggles to account for long-term harm to memory, language, education and identity. After more than 12 years of Russian occupation, Ukraine has a unique body of evidence with which to argue that the cultural dimension of genocide must be addressed not only academically, but legally.
Russia is waging war not only against Ukrainian culture but against Ukrainian identity. Ukraine is seeking to make international law recognize the full extent of that campaign.
When Russian forces enter a Ukrainian city, they do not look only for military personnel and officials whose names appear on their lists. They also search for teachers, priests of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, museum workers, local historians and librarians. Russia is waging war on memory, and those who carry that memory are more dangerous to it than weapons.
International law is not powerless in the face of attacks on culture: conventions and statutes already prohibit many such acts. Yet this legal framework primarily recognizes what can be counted, while the deepest dimension of the crime does not fit neatly into any existing category.
We have become accustomed to discussing the destruction of culture through the language of losses: how many sites have been damaged or destroyed and what exactly has been lost. This is a necessary and legitimate conversation, but it overlooks an important point: culture is a much broader and deeper concept. It holds communities together, transmits values, shapes consciousness and identity, and creates practices and an entire way of life around them.
A church is not only its walls but also its community. A school is not only a building but also a language. A local history museum is not merely a collection of objects but a city’s answer to the questions of who we are and where we come from.
Russia understands this perfectly well, and the consequences of its actions are becoming increasingly evident not only on the battlefield but also under occupation.
Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, warned from the outset that a group could be destroyed without every member being killed. It was enough to take away what made its members a group: their culture and collective consciousness.
Today, we call this cultural genocide. Yet the final text of the 1948 Genocide Convention did not include cultural genocide as a separate punishable act. Attacks on culture can be prosecuted as war crimes or crimes against humanity and may serve as evidence of genocidal intent, but cultural destruction alone is not among the acts listed in Article II of the Convention.
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