Berlin dubs Stalin famine in Ukraine as ‘genocide’
Germany is to declare the 1930s starvation of millions in Ukraine under Joseph Stalin a “genocide”, adopting language used by Kyiv, according to a draft text seen by AFP on Friday.
The joint resolution by deputies from Germany’s centre-left-led coalition and the opposition conservatives is also intended as a “warning” to Russia as Ukraine faces a potential hunger crisis this winter due to Moscow’s invasion.
Lawmakers plan to vote on the resolution this Wednesday following Ukraine’s memorial day for the Holodomor, as the famine is known, which falls on the last Saturday in November each year.
The Holodomor belongs on “the list of inhuman crimes by totalitarian systems in which millions of human lives were wiped out” in the first half of the 20th century, the draft text reads, including those committed by Nazi Germany.
“People across Ukraine, not just in grain-producing regions, were impacted by hunger and repression,” an orchestrated policy that “meets the historical-political definition from today’s perspective for genocide”.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock lent their backing to the parliamentary declaration on Friday via their spokespeople.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called Berlin’s move a “milestone” on Twitter. Ms Baerbock later credited Mr Kuleba with prompting Berlin to pass the resolution.
The 1932-33 Holodomor — Ukrainian for “death by starvation” — is regarded by Kyiv as a deliberate act of genocide by Stalin’s regime with the intention of wiping out the peasantry.
Stalin’s campaign of forced “collectivisation” seized grain and other foodstuffs and left millions to starve.
The German resolution says that up to 3.5 million people are believed to have died that winter alone but historians put the total death toll as high as 10 million.
The Holodomor has long been a source of hostility between Russia and Ukraine.
Moscow rejects Kyiv’s account, placing the events in the broader context of famines that devastated regions of Central Asia and Russia.
However Pope Francis this week also condemned the historical famine as a “genocide” as he expressed sympathy for the “suffering of the dear Ukrainian people” in the face of the current war.
“We pray for the victims of this genocide (in the 1930s) and for so many Ukrainians — children, women and the elderly, babies — who today suffer the martyrdom of aggression,” he said on Wednesday.
Romanian MPs approved a resolution the same day recognising “the Holodomor as a crime against the Ukrainian people and humanity”. The Irish senate also carried a motion to recognise the Holodomor “as a genocide on the Ukrainian people”.