European Parliament recognizes ‘Holodomor’ as genocide

On this Thursday (15), the European Union Parliament recognized the “Holodomor”, meaning the starvation of millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s, as genocide by the Soviet Union.

The text, which was ratified by 507 votes in favor and 12 against, in addition to 17 abstentions, says that “the artificial high cost caused by the deliberate policy of the Soviet regime in 1932 and 1933 is a genocide against the Ukrainian people.”

The “Holodomor”, also known as the “Great Famine”, is the starvation of more than 3 million Ukrainians after Joseph Stalin decided to confiscate the country’s agricultural production in the early 1930s.

To this day, Kyiv maintains that this policy was a deliberate move by the communist regime to starve Ukrainian peasants who resisted the collectivization of their crops and export their grain to finance the industrialization of the Soviet Union.

But Russia claims the Holodomor was unintentional and other Soviet republics were also suffering from famine.

In the text recognizing the genocide, the EU Parliament wants “all countries and international organizations” to follow the same path and criticizes Vladimir Putin’s regime for “manipulating historical memory”.