Why did Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine? After more than 300 years in the Russian sphere of influence, first as a de facto colony and then an integral part of the Soviet Union—its breadbasket and industrial heartland—Ukraine wants out. It wants to leave the Russian orbit for the West, fully embrace Western capitalism and democracy, and join Western alliances—NATO and the European Union—as soon as possible.

Nearby Georgia and Moldova are also chaffing against a long history of Russian subjugation. Like Ukraine, both are former socialist republics on the underbelly of the Russian colossus and until recently, both have been advancing toward EU membership. Popular opinion in both countries strongly favors joining the West. And it’s no accident that Putin and his proxies have done everything possible to block and skew their recent democratic elections.

In Moldova, where pre-election polls showed nearly two-thirds of voters in favor of EU membership, a network of Kremlin surrogates, including criminal groups and a pro-Russian oligarch, poured money into the country to interfere with electoral procedures and bribe voters. An estimated $100 million of walking-around cash goes a long way in a nation of just 3 million, and the upshot was a virtual tie in the nationwide referendum on joining the EU: 50.4 percent for joining to 49.6 percent against—hardly the decisive outpouring Moldovan president Maia Sandu was hoping for.

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An argumentative edge is a risky thing, especially in a book of history, even popular history. We want authors to have views—to see their material in a fresh light, to tell us what’s important, and to impose a frame on the raw facts that deepens our understanding of the past. Some readers even seek out history told from a particular point of view—Marxist history, for example, or postmodern history. But it’s easy for a historian to go too far, for a point of view to start to feel like a tendentious slant. Readers looking for truth quickly come to mistrust a writer who they feel has an ax to grind—especially when the case being made is an argument about genocide.

Eugene Finkel, now a professor of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, was born in Lviv, in western Ukraine, into a Jewish family deeply scarred by the Holocaust. As he tells us in his new book, Intent to Destroy, his grandfather Lev Finkel returned home from fighting in World War II to find that his extended family—parents, sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews—had perished. Eugene, born in 1977, went on to become a scholar of the Shoah, studying first in Israel, then the U.S. In 2017, he produced a well-received scholarly book, Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival During the Holocaust. Clearly, he knows a great deal about genocide and has some authority to make a case about the violence being perpetrated by Russia in Ukraine.

What he doesn’t seem to grasp is just how overused and muddy the word genocide has become, and how it might undermine rather than strengthen his case about Russia’s brutal aggression against Ukraine.

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By Tamar Jacoby

It looked like an ordinary, modest house on the outskirts of Sloviansk, a small city just behind the front line in eastern Ukraine. But the parlor’s heavy furniture had been replaced by folding tables and six big flat-screen TVs. Five men in fatigues monitored the images flashing across the screens: direct feeds from some three dozen first-person-view (FPV) drones hovering above the front line just 15 miles away.

There were no fighters in the images and no weapons or military vehicles. Both Russians and Ukrainians have learned to keep all that hidden from the drones constantly swarming overhead. But the invaders could still advance at any moment, and the soldiers in the command center — members of a new unit called “Heavenly Punishment” — scoured the video feeds, zooming in and out on tree lines and scattered rocks that might disguise foxholes.

A sixth screen integrated the information from the feeds: a giant animated map showing both sides’ positions and assets — a Russian tank here, a Russian surveillance drone loitering there. No one spoke as the men watched and probed, waiting for the opportunity to order a strike, either by an attack drone or one of the unit’s few remaining artillery cannons.

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