On December 9, 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention. Soviet Ukraine signed the document in 1949, and in 1954 ratified it.
Article II of Convention states:
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”.
Raphael Lemkin, the author of the word “genocide” and initiator of the Genocide Convention, called the destruction of the Ukrainian nation “a classic example of the genocide”. In accordance with the UN Convention, Lemkin considered the following items as an integral part of the genocide against Ukrainians: starvation of Ukrainian farmers, extermination of Ukrainian intelligentsia and elimination of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.