The text was voted almost unanimously, 507 votes for, 12 votes against and 17 abstentions. “Current Russian crimes in Ukraine recall the past,” insisted the Parliament in a press release.
MO12345lemonde with AFP
Two weeks after Germany, the European Parliament recognized, Thursday, December 15, the Holodomor as a genocide. This famine caused by the Soviets eighty years ago in Ukraine has resulted in the death of several million people.
In A text voted almost unanimously (507 votes for, 12 votes against and 17 abstentions), the MEPs gathered in Strasbourg estimate that the Holodomor (” hunger extermination “, in Ukrainian) was committed “by the Soviet regime with the intention of destroying a group of people by deliberately inflicting living conditions inexorably leading to their physical annihilation”.
“Current Russian crimes in Ukraine recall the past”, insisted in a Communicated The European Parliament, which awarded, on Wednesday in Strasbourg, its Sakharov of Liberty Prize thought of the Ukrainian people, who fight against the invasion of Russia.
Parliamentarians call “all countries and organizations” to recognize as genocide this famine in the face of a “Russian regime [which] manipulates historical memory for its own survival”.
Russia refuses such Classification
Nicknamed “the burning granary of Europe” for the fertility of its black lands, Ukraine lost between four and eight million inhabitants in the great famine of 1932-1933, against a background of collectivization of land , orchestrated according to historians by Stalin to repress any nationalist and independence desire for this country, then Soviet Republic.
Ukraine has been campaigning for years for Holodomor to be officially recognized as a genocide, a concept forged during the Second World War.
Russia categorically refuses such a classification, pretending that the great famine that raged in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s did not only made Ukrainian victims, but also Russian, Kazakhes, Germans of Volga and Members other peoples.
When Berlin called the Genocide Holomodor on November 30, Moscow accused him of “demonizing” Russia.