A new grievance on Russia’s list against France. Russia described this Saturday as “repugnant anti-Russian zeal” the vote of the French National Assembly, recognizing as genocide the Holodomor, a famine caused in the early 1930s in Ukraine by the Soviet authorities.
“The anti-Russian zeal of French deputies seems all the more repugnant as France itself has not yet closed the page of its crimes of the colonial period”, asserted in a press release the spokesperson for diplomacy. Russian, Maria Zakharova.
In a resolution adopted Tuesday with near-unanimity (168 votes to 2), MPs recognized the Holodomor as genocide, calling on the government to do the same, to meet Kiev’s high expectations about this painful memory. , revived by the Russian military intervention in the country.
The Holodomor is the name given in Ukraine to the mass famine organized in 1932-1933 by the leaders of the USSR to bring Ukrainian peasants to heel, nationalize their land, and suppress any desire for independence in the country. In November 1932, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin dispatched the police to seize all grain and livestock from newly collectivized Ukrainian farms, including the seeds needed to plant the next crop.
“Russophobia of our European adversaries”
The consequence, according to the sources, was 2.6 to 5 million deaths in two years. It was recognized in 2008 as a “crime against humanity” by the European Parliament, and as “genocide” last December. The text adopted in France “officially recognizes the genocidal character of the famine forced and planned by the Soviet authorities against the Ukrainian population in 1932 and 1933”.
According to Maria Zakharova, “once again we are confronted with the duplicity and Russophobia of our European adversaries”. She denounced “the double standards of the collective West and “an empty and senseless action” by France “hastily organized to please the kyiv regime”. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hailed a “historic decision” for his country. Russia denies any intentional nature of this great famine which also caused Russian and Kazakh victims.
At the beginning of December, when the German Parliament had voted in the same direction as the National Assembly, Moscow had similarly balked at “another attempt” to “demonize Russia and pit ethnic Ukrainians against Russians”. The Russian Foreign Ministry added that this decision had been taken by the Germans to “blur the memory of the unprecedented nature of the countless crimes committed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War”.