Vitaliy Tytych’s Speech in The Hague on Russia’s Crimes Against Ukrainian Culture and Identity

On July 5, 2026, in The Hague, Vitaliy Tytych, Chair of the Board of the Raphael Lemkin Society, attorney, and serviceman in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, spoke at the thematic discussion “War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, and the Crime of Genocide Committed by the Russian Federation.”

The event took place within the Parliamentary Support Team for Ukraine, a special format of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) that brings together practical and political support for Ukraine.

In his remarks, Vitaliy addressed Russia’s systematic crimes against Ukrainian culture, language, memory, and identity. He called for a broader legal understanding of these acts as part of a genocidal policy and urged the international community to begin a structured discussion on criminalizing crimes aimed at erasing national identity.

We are publishing the full text of the speech below.

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,

My name is Vitaliy Tytych. I represent the Ukrainian non-governmental organization, the Raphael Lemkin Society, and I also serve in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, where I document Russian atrocities. Every day, I witness the devastating consequences of the Russian invasion.

I have the honour to address you on a matter of deep concern – one that threatens not only the cultural heritage of Ukraine, but the very foundations of international law and the shared values we are here to protect.

When we seek justice for Russia’s crimes against Ukraine, we reach for the familiar categories: war crimes, crimes against humanity, aggression, genocide. But do they convey the true nature of what is happening? What we are witnessing is more than physical violence against people – it is a systematic attack on Ukrainian identity itself: museums and archives destroyed, heritage demolished, artefacts looted, curricula rewritten, the language forced out of public life, and children made to adopt a different history and a different loyalty.

My answer is that we have no adequate legal instrument for this today. As a representative of Ukrainian society, together with my colleagues, I see these acts not as separate offences but as elements of a single genocidal policy – a deliberate effort to ensure that Ukraine, as a nation, ceases to exist.

Raphael Lemkin, the man who gave us the word “genocide”, understood this crime not merely as the destruction of human beings, but as the destruction of the foundations upon which a group exists – its culture, language, institutions, and collective memory. That broader understanding was reflected in the 1946 UN General Assembly Resolution 96(I), which spoke of genocide as a loss to humanity of the cultural contributions embodied by human groups, before cultural genocide was ultimately excluded from the 1948 Genocide Convention. Today we live with the consequences – and we are entitled to ask whether it is time to reassess that decision.

I want to spend my remaining time on why this is not only a question of justice, but a question of security – and of the kind of peace we are able to build.

Start with the logic of prevention. Deterrence acts on intent – on strategy – not on isolated consequences. If the law sees only scattered war crimes, it punishes incidents but never the campaign behind them. The moment we recognise a coordinated intent to erase a people, we are no longer cataloguing damage – we are naming a security threat. And only a named threat can be deterred.

This is consistent with the very logic of the OSCE. Comprehensive security rests on the understanding that the human dimension is inseparable from security itself.

It is also decisive for a lasting peace, as the erasure of identity is engineered to outlast the war. Territory can be liberated; a deported, re-educated generation and an extinguished language cannot. A durable peace removes the incentives that produced the war – yet while identity-erasure escapes accountability, it stays a rational, low-cost tool, for this aggressor and for others watching what is tolerated. Recognising it is not backward-looking punishment but a forward-looking instrument of prevention.

So let me be precise about what we ask. We are not proposing to invent a new crime with a stroke of the pen, and we are not asking the prosecutors in this room to prejudge anything – we respect their independence fully. We are asking the international community to open a serious, structured discussion on how the destruction of identity should be qualified – in evidence, in prevention, and, in time, in doctrine. We are realistic: amending international law is a long process, shaped by political will. But declaring the readiness to begin is itself a decisive step – the step that moves us from academic debate about genocide to the examination of concrete cases here, in Ukraine.

A few weeks ago, Ukraine registered a legislative initiative in the Verkhovna Rada to restore elements of the broader understanding of genocide reflected in the 1946 Resolution. In doing so, Ukraine seeks not only justice for itself, but to contribute to the future development of international law – and to take a leading role in advocating these changes. Because preventing genocide, and building a peace that holds, is not Ukraine’s task alone. It is the shared responsibility of every state that wants security in this region to mean something.

In closing: war crimes tell us what happened; genocide tells us why. If international law can recognise the destruction of people, but not the destruction of the identity that makes them a people, then our understanding of genocide remains incomplete.

Thank you