Russia announced today that the decision of the German parliament that the famine in Ukraine in 1932-33. to declare genocide represents an anti-Russian provocation and an attempt by Germany to cover up its Nazi past.
In a decision welcomed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, German MPs yesterday adopted resolution declaring the starvation of millions of Ukrainians - the Holodomor - a genocide.
In November 1932, Soviet leader Josef Stalin sent the police to seize all grain and livestock from Ukrainian farms as part of forced collectivization. Millions of Ukrainian peasants starved to death in the following months in what Yale University historian Timothy Snyder calls "apparently premeditated mass murder."
Russia today rejected the claim that it was genocide and said that millions of people throughout other parts of the Soviet Union, including residents of Russia, also suffered.
"It is another attempt to justify and encourage a campaign - designed in Ukraine and sponsored by the West - to demonize Russia and incite ethnic Ukrainians against Russians," the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
"Germans are trying to rewrite their history ... to minimize their own guilt and obscure the memory of the countless and unprecedented atrocities committed by Nazi Germany during World War II," added the statement, reported by Reuters.
The ministry accused the German parliament of "reviving the fascist ideology of racial hatred and discrimination and trying to absolve itself of responsibility for war crimes" by adopting the resolution.
Several European states, including the former Soviet Baltic states, also recognize the Holodomor as genocide.
For Ukrainians, the Holodomor forms a central part of the country's identity as an independent nation-state, and evidence of the historical injustices inflicted on Ukrainians by leaders in Moscow.
Bonus video:
