Europe 1 with AFP 13:55 p.m., April 01, 2023

On the 402nd day of the war in Ukraine, Russia on Saturday described as "repugnant anti-Russian zeal" the vote of the French National Assembly, recognizing as a genocide the Holodomor, a famine caused in the early 1930s in Ukraine by the Soviet authorities, causing several million deaths.

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Russia on Saturday described as "repugnant anti-Russian zeal" the vote of the French National Assembly, recognizing as a genocide the Holodomor, a famine caused in the early 1930s in Ukraine by the Soviet authorities, causing several million deaths. "The anti-Russian zeal of the French deputies seems all the more repugnant as the France itself has not yet closed the page of its crimes of the colonial period," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement.

Information to remember:

  • Russia on Saturday called the French National Assembly's vote recognizing the Holodomor a genocide a "repugnant anti-Russian zeal."

In a resolution adopted Tuesday almost unanimously (168 votes to 2), MEPs recognized the Holodomor as genocide, calling on the government to do the same, to meet Kiev's strong expectation about this painful memory, revived by the Russian military intervention in the country. The adopted text "officially recognizes the genocidal character of the forced and planned famine by the Soviet authorities against the Ukrainian population in 1932 and 1933".

According to Maria Zakharova, "once again we are facing the duplicity and Russophobia of our European adversaries." She denounced "the double standards of the 'collective West'" and "an empty and senseless action" of the France "hastily organized to please the Kiev regime". Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky welcomed a "historic decision" for his country.

Nicknamed "the breadbasket of Europe" for the fertility of its black earths, Ukraine lost several million inhabitants in the great famine of 1932-1933, against a background of collectivization of land, orchestrated according to historians by Stalin to repress any desire for independence in this country, then a Soviet republic. In mid-December, the European Parliament also described the Holodomor as genocide.

Russia, for its part, categorically refuses this classification, citing the fact that the great famine of the 1930s had not only made Ukrainian victims, but also Russians, Kazakhs, and among other peoples.