Russia's War Against Ukraine
OP-ED
Alexander J. Motyl: Putin’s war on civilians defines terrorism
People stand beside the body of a man killed after a shell hit a residential area, killing two civilians in Donetsk's Kyibishevsky district, on January 30, 2015. AFP PHOTO /
Russian President Vladimir Putin is rapidly cementing his reputation as a sponsor of terrorism in Ukraine. One could, with some stretch of the imagination, have qualified the earlier violence perpetrated by his proxies in eastern Ukraine as mere “separatism.” In a blog post on April 14, 2014, however, I suggested that it qualified as terrorism, and that Putin’s Russia was therefore a state sponsor of terrorism. I then provided the definition of terrorism found in Section 2656f(d) of Title 22 of the United States Code:
