Russia slams French parliament for calling Holodomor ‘genocide’

The French Senate adopted a resolution recognising the Holodomor famine as genocide in a move that ‘rewrites history’, said the Russian Embassy in France on Thursday.

The resolution was adopted by senators on Wednesday evening by a vast majority. The text, supported by the Senate majority (right), recognises that “between 1932 and 1933, the Soviet regime methodically organised the ‘extermination by hunger’ – or Holodomor, as it is known in Ukraine – of several million Ukrainians.”

The Communist senators and one from the centre-right were the only ones to vote against the text, while the only senator from the far-right (Reconqête, former Le Pen’s National Rally) did not take part in the vote.

The adoption of the resolution did not fail to arouse the anger of Russia through its embassy in France. On Thursday (18 May), it denounced the French parliament’s desire to “rewrite history and instrumentalise past events for perfidious political purposes”. At the end of March, the French National Assembly also adopted a resolution stating the Holodomor was a genocide.

As a warning to other institutions that might take a similar initiative, “political speculation about the ‘Holodomor’ for the benefit of the Kyiv regime only endorses its ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi policies,” the Russian Embassy in France concluded.

To deny the accusation of a genocide perpetrated in Ukraine, Russian diplomacy recalls that the famines of 1932-1933 affected several other areas of the USSR, such as the North Caucasus, the Volga and Kazakhstan. However, in the case of Ukraine, these famines were intentionally aggravated by the Soviet power – on Joseph Stalin’s initiative – because the area was resisting his policy.

Thus, the “organised famine was aimed at the negation of Ukrainian identity and the disappearance of the Ukrainian nation”, the resolution said.

The text also condemns “the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia to Russify them” during the Holodomor.

Finally, the French upper house deplores that “despite official recognition of this tragedy after the fall of the USSR in 1991, the current Russian authorities now deny the very existence of the Holodomor.”

For their part, the Ukrainians expressed their gratitude to the French parliamentarians. In a tweet, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed an “important step towards restoring historical justice and perpetuating the memory of millions of Ukrainians who died of hunger”.

Several other parliamentary institutions have adopted a similar text in Europe, such as the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Parliament, the Irish Senate, the German Bundestag, and the French National Assembly.

In France, several resolutions related to the war in Ukraine have been adopted or will be discussed in the coming months. In particular, the French parliament has called on the EU to classify the Wagner group as a terrorist organisation and has denounced the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.

(Davide Basso | EURACTIV.fr)

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