Liz Cheney says Ukraine train station attack was genocide

Rep. Liz Cheney on Sunday branded Russia’s rocket attack on a Ukrainian train station as “clearly genocide,” while National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan did not accept the description of the appalling civilian slaughter.

Cheney, an anti-Trump Republican from Wyoming, said there was no question that the attack that killed at least 52 people, including five children, at a crowded Kramatorsk train station on Friday was genocide.

“I think … Europe needs to understand and confront that there is a genocidal campaign going on, the first kind of horrific genocidal campaign that we’ve seen for sure in the last few decades,” Cheney said on CNN’s State of the Union. .”

Friday’s attack, which took place when about 4,000 civilians were in and around the station, has been denounced by some as yet another war crime amid Russia’s invasion of the country.

Sullivan admitted on Sunday that the train station attack was a war crime.

“It absolutely constitutes a war crime,” Sullivan said in a separate interview with the State of the Union.

In fact, President Biden was way ahead of the majority of the world when he declared that what Russia was doing and what Vladimir Putin was authorizing here were war crimes. We saw that in Kramatorsk, Bucha and other parts of Ukraine. The systematic attacking of civilians, the gruesome murder,” he said.

But Sullivan dodged host Jake Tapper’s direct answer when asked, “Why isn’t this genocide?

“In my opinion, the label is less important than the fact that these acts are cruel and criminal and wrong and evil and must be acted upon decisively,” Sullivan said. “And that’s exactly what we’re doing.

“We do this not only by supporting international investigations and collecting evidence to hold perpetrators accountable up to the highest levels. We do this by providing the Ukrainians with sophisticated weapons that make a big difference on the battlefield,” he continued.

The UN defines genocide as acts, such as murder, committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”.

Some legal experts say they are no longer using the term in Ukraine, at least in part because of its strict legal definition, including the fact that a pattern of proven cases must be established before an international court.

One expert recently remarked to Politico that the term has “moral connotations” that “suggest you need to take a stronger form of action.”