Genocidal war is not what is occurring. It is a land war where Putin wants to gain access to and control significant resources and a warm body of water in the southeast.
I've gotta say, if this is not recognizable as genocidal war to you, can you please lay down a firm line that needs to be crossed before you apply that term? Because the way things are going if Putin doesn't cross it today, he will soon enough.
Because what do you think happens if Putin takes over Ukraine? When you look at the images of the bombed hospitals, what do you think happens next, after the brutal dictator takes over the country filled with people whom he claims are Nazis?
Doubly so since the USSR manipulated borders to be bad like sykes-picot
one of the main reason for the indiscriminate shelling and bombing of the cities that Russia conducts is displacement of Ukrainians into the West Ukraine and farther, i.e. ethnical cleansing. The much smaller population left will as a a result have a [scared] pro-Russian majority and will "democratically" vote for the government of Ukraine (or whatever part of Ukraine Russia wants to hold, and they would prefer it to include Kiev as that would make it "Ukraine") doing what Russia wants.
However, when USA troops came to Afghanistan... Of course american troops were fighting terrorists. They did no harm to civilians, they came to spread freedom, boost independent spirit, and significantly contributed to Afghan culture.
Now show an official Ukraine policy documents declaring targeting Russians based on Russian national or ethnic identity. A pattern of such activity without official policy documents would do to. Though for example the fact that mostly Russians are killed in the invading tanks doesn't qualify because it is just happens that the tanks are manned mostly by Russians and those Russians are killed not for being Russians, they are killed for driving invading tanks.
For the current genocide conducted by Russia in Ukraine Putin's editorial and speeches, including the speech declaring the war, declaring erasure of Ukrainian national and ethnic identity are such official policy documents.
Denial of sovereignty isn't genocide
The denial of sovereignty here is just a tool to achieve the goal Putin openly declared in particular in his editorial and speeches - erasing of Ukrainians national identity. In order to achieve that goal he kills and displaces carriers of that national and ethnic identity, ie. Ukrainians, and that is genocide.
This is what Russia exactly does in Ukraine:
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
" In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; "
Wikipedia defines genocide as:
> Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people, usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group.
We can call it as we want. History will judge. But we know the duck test: if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
1. https://www.reuters.com/world/un-rights-office-has-credible-...
2. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/11/hell-in-ukraines-ma...
3. https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-putin-pilot-shot-civ...