If Russia’s atrocities are genocide, world leaders have a duty to act. Will they?

Defence Minister Anita Anand said in an interview with The West Block there appears to be a "strong argument" that Putin's forces are inflicting genocide on the Ukrainian people.

Almost three decades after the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, Roméo Dallaire says he worries too little has changed.

“The West has learned absolutely nothing,” said the former United Nations force commander in an interview with The West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson.

“What the international community and the developed world in particular has discovered is that it doesn’t want to take risks.”

Dallaire spoke as international focus is shifting to whether Russia‘s atrocities in Ukraine constitute a genocide — and if so, whether world leaders are willing to uphold their responsibility to protect.

As the former UN commander, Dallaire witnessed the horrors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, as well as the futility of global condemnations without the willingness to act to force an end to the violence.

As a leading voice now on genocide prevention and the responsibility to protect, he says the work of human rights investigators is critical to determining whether the atrocities happening on the ground in Ukraine by Russian forces amount to the definition of genocide.

“The international community signed up that if there is a genocide, we all have a responsibility to stop it — to stop it — which means to engage in stopping it, not watching it,” Dallaire emphasized.

The key question for the investigators will be whether the “massive abuses of human rights” made clear as Russian forces retreated over recent weeks from the area around Kyiv were carried out by rogue commanders or troops, or carried out on the direction of the Russian government.