Putin: "Genocide"

He said that the population in the war-torn east of Ukraine, a zone that is currently at the center of new tensions between Moscow and the West, was affected by "Russophobia", which, in his words, is "the first step towards genocide".
"I have to talk about Russophobia as the first step towards genocide. It is currently happening in Donbas (as the region in eastern Ukraine is called). We see it well, we know it. And of course, it looks like the genocide you talked about", Putin told a reporter during a meeting of the Presidential Human Rights Council.
He responded to a journalist, a Ukrainian of Russian descent, who asked him to introduce the terms genocide and incitement to genocide into Russian law.
The journalist, who was imprisoned in Ukraine in 2018 and 2019, said that Russian-speaking people and members of the Russian people in eastern Ukraine, in Donbas, have experienced "unbearable living conditions."
He compared the situation there to the crimes of the Holocaust. The statements were made at a time when the east of Ukraine is again at the center of great international tensions, when the West accuses Moscow of concentrating tens of thousands of soldiers with a plan of a possible attack on that country.
The war between Kiev and pro-Russian separatists has been going on in that zone for seven years.
More than 13.000 people were killed in the conflict, and the political agreement, provided for in the Minsk agreements from 2015, is at a standstill.
Russia is considered the main country that supports and finances the rebels, although it denies it.
Russian authorities and Russian state media regularly accuse Kiev of fueling the conflict by pursuing a discriminatory policy towards people of Russian descent, which the...