Bundestag condemns Holodomor as genocide

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View of the plenary hall in the Reichstag building (symbol image)

Photo: Kay Nietfeld / dpa

The Bundestag classifies the Holodomor as genocide against the Ukrainian people.

Late on Wednesday afternoon, a large majority of MPs voted in favor of a corresponding motion, which the traffic light coalition of SPD, Greens and FDP and the CDU/CSU parliamentary groups had jointly introduced.

In the Bundestag debate, all factions condemned the Holodomor, but the AfD and the left abstained from voting on the motion.

The Holodomor – Ukrainian for “killing by starvation” – described a devastating famine in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1930s.

In the winter of 1932/33 alone there were three to three and a half million starvation deaths, the estimates for the total number of victims are four to eight million.

(Read more about the topic here.)

The events are sharply condemned in the application by Ampel and Union.

»The mass deaths from starvation were not the result of failed harvests, but were the responsibility of the political leadership of the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin.

The Holodomor thus represents a crime against humanity,” it says.

In a statement, Parliament also called for “the creation of a European public for the topic of the Holodomor in order to raise European awareness of its background”.

The Holodomor is still unknown to many people.

The famine as such is indisputable.

However, the answer to the question of whether a targeted, politically desired escalation of the famine in the territory of the Ukraine was a genocide by the Soviet leadership against the people living there is disputed.

The Bundestag has now approved this.

fek/AFP/dpa