Last year, I wrote an article about passportization on Medium in which I argued that passports had increasingly become weapons in Russia’s war against Ukrainian identity. In that article, I focused on how Russian passports were being used to legitimate Russian claims over both territory and the people who inhabit it, echoing the earlier use of that strategy in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the lead-up to the war against Georgia in 2008.

In that essay, I wrote that “passportization should be understood not merely as a political technology, but also as a colonial strategy whose purpose is to sever the cultural, historical, political and territorial connections between the populations of occupied territories and their own country. Moreover, it is being used to discipline a largely unwilling and resistant subject population and to force it to integrate into the Russian political system and hasten the political and cultural russification of occupied territories, largely against the will of the people who live there.”

The fundamental coloniality inherent in the practice of passportization was evident in how, in occupied territories, access to basic goods and services, the right to own property, etc. all became tied to the possession of Russian citizenship. Not only did this represent a means by which to assert control over the lives of people who live in occupied territories, but it was also a vector for the Russification of those populations and the erasure of their Ukrainian identity. Along with distributing Russian passports, occupation authorities have also introduced the ruble as currency, implemented curricula that promote a Russo-centric interpretation of history, imposed Russian law, effaced traces of Ukrainian culture on the physical landscape, deported hundreds of thousands of children into Russia, and so forth.

To this list, unfortunately, Russia has now added the blocking of access to critical medications, including insulin, as well as access to medical care, to anyone in the occupied territories who does not possess a Russian passport. As UNITED24 Media has noted, these changes are being implemented alongside restrictions on pension payments to the elderly and the escalation of longstanding threats to treat anyone without a Russian passport as a “foreigner” on their own land, which could potentially subject them to prosecution or deportation.

To put it plainly, this means that accepting Russian citizenship—that is, the citizenship of an occupying power—has become, more than ever, literally a matter of life and death. As I wrote in my earlier essay on passportization:

If the national consciousness of unwilling Ukrainians may take generation to fully russify, then the russification of their everyday lives — the replacement of what might be termed a “Ukrainian habitus” by a Russian one — can be achieved relatively swiftly. Passportization…is an important piece of this process.

After all, at the most basic level, passports document a person’s belonging to a particular political community: is someone a citizen of Russia or of Ukraine? What are the ramifications of those different modes of belonging? Which rights, responsibilities, obligations, or damages accrue in either case? As we have already seen, possession of a Russian passport has become the only way that many people in occupied territories have access to basic life necessities, housing, work, and so forth. What this means is that peoples’ lives, both in a purely biological sense, but also as political subjects, hinges in some sense on “belonging” to Russia in a very real sense.

This, I would argue, is consistent with Raphael Lemkin’s conception of genocide.

In popular discourse, the crime of genocide has become associated with the industrial murder carried out by the Nazi regime. The unfortunate upshot of this is that, for many people, anything that does not resemble the Holocaust, either in method, scale, or explicitness, fails to meet the standard of what constitutes genocide. However, as Leora Bilsky and Rachel Klagsbrun have argued, insisting on such a standard fails to acknowledge that Lemkin himself did not conceptualize genocide in this narrow way. Rather, they note that Lemkin conceptualized crimes like the Holocaust as being part of a larger process of destroying and/or replacing the culture of a population with that of the oppressor:

Lemkin’s emphasis on culture is connected to his view of genocide as a crime with both “negative” and “positive” aspects, organically linked and manifested in various techniques of genocide. Thus, he describes a two-phased process: “[O]ne, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group [the negative aspect]; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor [the positive aspect].”

[Note: when they use the terms “positive” and “negative” they are not making normative moral judgments about “right” or “wrong” but rather about what we might call “additive” and “subtractive” actions]

For Lemkin, the destruction of culture was the fundamental basis of genocide, and the physical destruction of a given community represented simply one means by which that destruction could be effected. Lemkin, however, understood genocide as both the destruction of culture and its replacement by the culture of the oppressor. Given the context in which passportization in the occupied territories is currently being undertaken, I would argue that it is fully consistent with how Lemkin understood the term.

Although the concept of “cultural genocide” is not explicitly included in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (a fact that Bilsky and Klagsburn note is due in no small part to fears on the part of European colonial empires that a more expansive definition of genocide would leave them exposed to external interference in their internal affairs), the sort of cultural erasure that Russia is perpetrating in Ukraine does appear to be rooted in genocidal intent, rather than merely as the “collateral damage” of war.

As Eugene Finkel argues in his recent book, Intent to Destroy, since 2022, Russia has destroyed hundreds of museums and libraries, burned Ukrainian-language books, stolen archives and objects of cultural heritage, and colonized conquered cities like Maripol. Furthermore, he writes:

This attack on Ukrainian identity has moved beyond the past and the present and seeks to destroy the country's future. Throughout occupied Ukraine, Russian authorities engage in a massive, coordinated effort to deport to Russia and forcibly Russify children, without whom the Ukrainian nation cannot go on.

[…]

Forcible transfer of children is explicitly prohibited under the Geneva Conventions and—if done with the intent to destroy a national group, which is clearly the case in Ukraine—constitutes an act of genocide.

Passportization, I argue, must be understood in the same terms: Russia is weaponizing legal documents in concert with other actions, such as the ones Finkel describes, to both erase Ukrainian culture in occupied territories and replace it with Russian culture. These actions are also meant to effect the disappearance of Ukrainian people and their replacement by Russians — or at least Russian citizens.

Increasingly, those who resist assimilation face one of two alternatives: death, either violently or by deliberate neglect, or expulsion.

With Russia boasting of having distributed over 2 million passports in occupied territories, it is clear that, while countless Ukrainians have been murdered in cold blood and unceremoniously thrown into holes in the ground, even more of the victims of Russia’s genocide remain among the living, facing a future where their very identity is under attack while that of their children is being dissolved entirely, overwritten by the colonial imprint of the perpetrator.

The intent, ultimately, is to erase Ukrainianness as a distinct category, either through bloodshed or assimilation, and render it synonymous with Russianness.

If we can’t call this genocide, then of what use is the word?