Russia said the German parliament’s move to recognize the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine as genocide imposed by the Soviet Union was an anti-Russian provocation and an attempt by Germany to whitewash its Nazi past.
In a move welcomed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, German lawmakers passed a resolution on Wednesday recognizing the starvation of millions of Ukrainians, in what is known as the Holodomor, as genocide.
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had deployed police forces in November of 1932 to confiscate all grain and livestock from Ukrainian farms, including the seeds needed to grow the next crop.
Millions of Ukrainian peasants died of starvation in the following months in what historian Timothy Snyder of Yale University calls “a premeditated mass murder”.
Russia on Thursday rejected the claim that what had happened was genocide and said that millions of people in other regions of the Soviet Union, including in Russia, also suffered.
“There is another attempt to justify and fuel a campaign, planted and sponsored by the West in Ukraine, to demonize Russia and incite people of Ukrainian origin against the Russians,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
She added that “the Germans are trying to rewrite their history … and reduce the severity of their guilt and obliterate the memory of the unprecedented nature of the countless crimes committed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.”
The ministry accused the German parliament of “reviving the fascist ideology that includes racial hatred and discrimination and trying to absolve itself of responsibility for war crimes” by adopting the recognition.
Many European countries, including the former Soviet Baltic states, recognize the famine as genocide.
For Ukrainians, the Holodomor represents a central aspect of the country’s identity as an independent nation-state, and evidence of the historical injustice inflicted on Ukrainians by Moscow’s leaders.
Zelensky said the German parliament’s decision was “a decision for justice and truth” and “an important signal to many other countries of the world that Russia’s policy of seeking revenge will not succeed in rewriting history.”
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