Of course this is nothing new. It's the same playbook that Stalin used to purge millions (see the part about ethnic minorities here, or example in the Holomodor.
So Putin is just reviving this pattern which goes back basically to the founding of the Russian Empire. It's a National pastime.
It's gobsmacking just how thoroughly propagandized you are. It is very clear from the historical record and from contemporary analysis that the famine that struck Ukraine was not a deliberate act of Stalin nor of any leader. However, it is abundantly clear from the record, even at the time, that Churchill deliberately starved India and killed millions in order to appropriate their food to feed the UK.
You want to talk about national pastimes? Just examine the 600-year history of extinction projects perpetrated by white Europeans. When the Dutch landed on the Island of Taiwan they hunted all of the deer on the island to extinction. When the USA wanted to steal land from the Lakota and Dakota people they killed every single buffalo because the original treaty said "as long as the buffalo roam the plains". 57 different tribes are fully extinct in the US alone. American eugenics programs operated through the 1970s and resulted in the sterilization of fully 1/3 of Puerto Rico. Long before the European Third Reich built gas chambers the European French were pumping gas into ship hulls to kill hundreds and thousands of rebelling slaves in Haiti. Every year 50k new slaves were brought to the tiny island of Haiti because it was cheaper to work them all to death and buy new ones.
The West has absolutely no basis from which to say they will protect anyone from genocide or aggression. They are the supreme aggressors. They dominated 80% of the world's population and to this day dominate the vast majority of the world's people through direct colonialism and indirect neocolonialism.
And you want to try to describe Russian violence as both genocidal and a national pastime? Fuck off you ignorant drone
People out here literally downvoting a comment that's just sources from The Atlantic, wikipedia, aljazeera, and peer reviewed academic journals. Y'all starting to run out of copium?
That article shows hundreds died in mass killings as part of the conflict. Do you really think hundreds of people are a genocide? If that's a genocide, then the US has committed 10x the number of genocides and shouldn't be leading the effort to "protect" anyone.
If you think this is an example of whataboutism, you're braindead.
What was said was that Russia had committed genocide and this was the justification for the US-led transnational nuclear military of NATO to expand. The logic, of course, is that Europe needs the USA to protect it from genocidal countries like Russia. But the USA is more genocidal than Russia, so it becomes a problematic justification to say that the USA commits genocide more often, more violently, and more effectively but that's preferable to Russia committing genocide less often, less violently, and less effectively.
Whataboutism is when the USA commits genocide and then everyone ignores it and says "What about Chechnya?"