UK Parliament recognises Holodmor as genocide of Ukrainians

On May 25, the House of Commons, the lower house of the UK parliament, unanimously voted in favour of recognising the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as a genocide of the Ukrainian people.

Conservative MP Pauline Latham, who tabled the relevant motion to the House of Commons, stressed that the famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s was man-made, caused by the forced seizure of crops from Ukrainian farmers.

She also drew parallels with current events, given that Russia is now stealing Ukrainian grain in the occupied Ukrainian territories.

"That is why we must assure the Ukrainian authorities and the international legal order that the UK, at least the British Parliament, will not ignore war crimes and crimes against humanity," European Pravda quotes Latham as saying.

Other MPs who spoke in favour of the motion said the Holodomor must be recognised as a genocide to show solidarity with the Ukrainian people and send out a signal that famine cannot be used as a means of waging war.

In total, the Holodomor has now been recognised as a genocide of the Ukrainian people by the parliaments of almost three dozen countries in the world, including European countries.

Holodomor was a man-made famine that convulsed the Soviet Republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, peaking in the late spring of 1933. It was part of a broader Soviet famine (1931–34) that also caused mass starvation in the grain-growing regions of Soviet Russia and Kazakhstan. The Ukrainian famine, however, was made deadlier by a series of political decrees and decisions that were aimed mostly or only at Ukraine. In acknowledgement of its scale, the famine of 1932–33 is often called the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor).

The origins of the famine lay in the decision by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to collectivize agriculture in 1929. Teams of Communist Party agitators forced peasants to relinquish their land, personal property and sometimes housing to collective farms, and they deported so-called kulaks—wealthier peasants—as well as any peasants who resisted collectivization altogether. Collectivization led to a drop in production, the disorganization of the rural economy, and food shortages. It also sparked a series of peasant rebellions, including armed uprisings, in some parts of Ukraine.