Polish president says genocide in Ukraine ‘hard to deny’

Polish President Andrzej Duda said in an interview aired on Wednesday that it is “hard to deny” that genocide is occurring in Ukraine amid Russia’s ongoing invasion.

During an interview with Duda, CNN host Dana Bash noted that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had already accused Moscow of committing genocide.

“It is hard to deny this, of course,” Duda replied. “This is a crime which fulfills the features of a genocide, especially if you look at the context of different conversations that are being conducted.”

“We hear about denazification of Ukraine. It is nonsense. It is rubbish. It is an obvious — like Russian propaganda,” he added.

“This is just false — looking for a false pretext in order to carry out a massacre, in order to kill people, and the fact that civilian inhabitants of Ukraine have been killed shows best what the goal of Russian invasion is — the goal of that invasion is simply to extinguish the Ukrainian nation,” he added.

Ukrainian officials have shared footage in recent days of dead bodies strewn around Bucha, a Kyiv suburb, including one photo showing people’s hands tied behind their backs. Reports have also emerged of a mass grave in the city. Russia, for its part, has claimed the photos of Bucha are fake.

“Indeed, this is genocide,” Zelensky said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

“The elimination of the whole nation and the people. We are the citizens of Ukraine. We have more than 100 nationalities. This is about the destruction and extermination of all these nationalities,” he continued.

Decrying the mass graves in Bucha and dead Ukrainians left in the street, President Biden on Wednesday also alleged that “there is nothing less happening than major war crimes.”