Germany’s parliament on Wednesday approved a resolution recognizing as genocide Ukraine’s 1930s “Holodomor,” a famine believed to have killed more than 3 million Ukrainians under the repressive rule of Soviet leader Josef Stalin, APA reports citing Associated Press.
The resolution was brought to the lower house, or Bundestag, by the three parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition and the main opposition bloc. After a debate attended by Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, it passed with their support in a show of hands, while the two other opposition parties abstained.
The vote comes days after Ukrainians marked the 90th anniversary of the start of the famine.
The resolution states that “the mass deaths from hunger were not a result of failed harvests; the political leadership of the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin was responsible for them.” It adds that all things Ukrainian were “deeply suspect” to Stalin and notes that “the whole of Ukraine was affected by hunger and repression, not just its grain-producing areas.”
According to the Holomodor Museum in Kyiv, 16 states in addition to Ukraine so far have recognized the famine as genocide: Australia, Ecuador, Estonia, Canada, Colombia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, the United States and the Vatican. Some other countries, including Argentina, Chile and Spain, have condemned it as “an act of extermination.”
Last week, Pope Francis linked the suffering of Ukrainians now to the 1930s “genocide artificially caused by Stalin.”
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