It is wrong and dangerous to fling the word ‘genocide’ around. Russia is unquestionably committing atrocities in Ukraine. In spiked’s view, its unprovoked war of aggression against the sovereign Ukrainian people is itself an atrocity, an abomination, that must come to an end immediately. But genocide? That is a very specific term. It doesn’t just mean ‘bloody war in which many people are dying’. If it does, then the Western invasion of Iraq was a genocide. So was NATO’s bombing of Libya. So is Saudi Arabia’s grotesque crusade against Yemen. Biden and his political acolytes back or backed all those wars. It would make as much sense for Putin to call Biden a genocidaire as it does for Biden to say that of Putin.

No, a genocide is the conscious mass murder of a significant number of people from an ethnic or national group with the broader aim of destroying that ethnic or national group. There’s no evidence Russia is doing that in Ukraine. Making baseless accusations of genocide is a very serious thing. First, as already outlined, because it intensifies conflict. It transforms what are usually horrible civil wars or, as in this case, wars of aggression by one nation against another into existential battles; into epoch-shaking showdowns between Good and Evil in which ‘we’ – the heavily armed outsiders – have a responsibility to intervene. The truth and the realpolitik of the war at hand – and, by extension, the possibility of resolving it through talks or deals or terms of surrender – get buried under all the hysterical talk of modern-day Holocausts. Pontificating about ‘genocide’ might make Biden and other Western liberals feel puffed-up and self-important, but it frequently has escalating and disastrous consequences for the people caught up in the war that these people are giddily exploiting for virtue and retweets.