DISINFO: Russophobic historical concepts, including so-called holodomor-genocide, have brought Ukraine to a civil war
SUMMARY
History teaches that it teaches nothing. Russophobic historical concepts, including so-called famine-genocide, have already brought Ukraine to a civil war that has lasted almost seven years and claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people.
RESPONSE
Historical revisionism and a recurring pro Kremlin disinformation narrative about Holodomor, claiming that there was no artificially created famine in Ukraine and about the war in Ukraine, presenting the latter as a civil war.
The Holodomor was an artificial famine created with the aim of destroying the Ukrainian peasantry. The Soviet state took away livestock, crops and seeds from the peasants under the guise that the peasants "plundered" state property. The Soviet law on the seizure of food from peasants was adopted in 1932. The punitive document is known as the "Five Spikelet Law". Everyone who gathered several ears of wheat on the collective farm field was a culprit in the "theft of state property". If the law was not enforced, people were shot, including children. Convicts were not subject to amnesty. The famine of 1932-1933 claimed the lives of 7 to 10 million citizens of the Soviet Union; the disaster affected not only Ukraine but also parts of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Russia.
The Holodomor is well documented and confirmed by a huge array of declassified documents, including official documents of the Soviet authorities and the Communist Party. In 2006, the Verkhovna Rada officially recognised the Holodomor of 1932-33 as a genocide of the Ukrainian people. According to the latest data, 15 UN member states and the Vatican state recognise the Holodomor as an act of genocide in Ukraine. The European Parliament and PACE have recognised the Holodomor as a crime of the Soviet regime against their own people and a crime against humanity.
There is no civil war in Ukraine. The EU has repeatedly condemned the clear violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity by acts of aggression by the Russian armed forces since February 2014, and the illegal annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol by Russia, as well as the militarisation of the peninsula, the severe deterioration of the human rights situation there as well as restrictions of the freedom of movement for Ukrainian citizens to and from the Crimean Peninsula.