I need some help with genocide explanation

[Beastly Boy]

2. Here is where international law takes over.

What Russia is doing to the Ukrainians is more fitting with the legal definition of ethnic cleansing rather than genocide. It is likely that the difficulty in arguing genocide in this case comes from this distinction.

As an aside, though, Russia's claims of them and the Ukrainians being the same people had been debunked in legal terms during the Soviet era: Ukraine was one of the fifteen "independent" Soviet republics, recognized as distinct by the Soviet Constitution, just as Russia was distinct in that Union. And the distinction was pretty much along the cultural, ethnic and linguistic lines, making Ukraine a de jure separate nation.