Germany is to adopt a resolution that will consider the famine caused by the Stalinist regime in Ukraine 90 years ago a “genocide,” as stated in a draft resolution by the ruling coalition and the opposition revealed on Friday.
The decision, presented by the governing coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals of the Liberal Democratic Party, as well as by the conservative opposition represented by the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union, will be debated in the Lower House (Bundestag) next Wednesday.
In 1932 and 1933, about 3.5 million Ukrainians were victims of the so-called Ukrainian “holodomor”, i.e. “extermination by hunger” committed by the Stalinist regime with the confiscation of crops in the name of land division.
The draft resolution, seen by Agence France-Presse, says that this famine is “in the list of inhuman crimes committed by totalitarian regimes that have destroyed millions of human lives in Europe, especially in the first half of the 20th century”. He adds that this crime “is part of our common history as Europeans”.
The draft resolution stresses that “the whole of Ukraine has been affected by famine and repression, not just its grain-growing regions”, stressing that “from the current perspective, it is clear that this is historically and politically genocidal “.
This characterization of “genocide” is a concept coined during World War II, but it also takes on special significance with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Once again violence and terrorism are depriving Ukraine of its vital foundations, and exhausting the entire country”, says Greens MP Robin Wagner, one of the authors of the dissemination of the text, underlining that by adopting the description of “Holodomor” like “genocide” constitutes a “warning signal”.
Wagner added that Russian President Vladimir Putin “is in the cruel and criminal tradition of Stalin”. Ukraine has campaigned for years to have the Holodomor recognized as a “genocide”.
Russia categorically rejects this description, emphasizing that the great famine that struck the Soviet Union in the early thirties of the last century was not only Ukrainian, but also Russian, Kazakh, Volga German and other peoples.
