People light candles and lay flowers in front of the monument honoring the victims of the Holodomor in Kyiv, Ukraine, November 26, 2022. The term Holodomor, which means ‘extermination through hunger’ in Ukrainian, refers to the great famine that hit there took place in 1932-1933 and caused the deaths of millions of people. ANDREW KRAVCHENKO / AP
Two weeks after Germany, on Thursday December 15, the European Parliament recognized the Holodomor as a genocide. This famine, caused by the Soviets in Ukraine ninety years ago, claimed the lives of several million people.
In a text adopted almost unanimously (507 votes in favour, 12 against and 17 abstentions), MEPs gathered in Strasbourg believe that the Holodomor (“extermination through hunger” in Ukrainian) “was committed by the regime with the intention of destroying a group of people to annihilate people by knowingly inflicting on them living conditions that inevitably lead to their physical annihilation”.
“Current Russian crimes in Ukraine are reminiscent of the past,” stressed the European Parliament in a press release, which on Wednesday in Strasbourg awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to the Ukrainian people fighting against the invasion of Russia. .
The parliamentarians call on “all countries and organizations” to recognize this famine in the face of a “Russian regime” as genocide [qui] manipulates historical memory for its own survival.
Russia rejects such a classification
Dubbed the “granary of Europe” for the fertility of its black soils, Ukraine lost between four and eight million inhabitants in the Great Famine of 1932-1933 against a backdrop of land collectivization orchestrated by Stalin, according to historians, to quell any nationalist will for independence of this country, then Soviet Republic.
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Ukraine has campaigned for years to have the Holodomor officially recognized as a genocide, a concept coined during World War II.
Russia categorically denies such a classification, claiming that the great famine that ravaged the Soviet Union in the early 1930s claimed not only Ukrainian victims, but also Russians, Kazakhs, Volga Germans and members of other peoples.
When Berlin on November 30 called the Holomodorus a genocide, Moscow accused him of “demonizing” Russia.
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