Russia Calls French National Assembly’s Vote Recognizing Holodomor Genocide ‘Repugnant Anti-Russian Zeal’

The vote of the French National Assembly, Tuesday March 28, recognizing as a genocide the Holodomor, a famine caused at the beginning of the 1930s in Ukraine by the Soviet authorities, at the origin of several million deaths, did not failed to make Moscow react. On Saturday April 1, Russia described the vote of the French deputies as “disgusting anti-Russian zeal”. An act, according to a statement by the spokesperson for Russian diplomacy, Maria Zakharova, “all the more repugnant that France itself has not yet closed the page of its crimes of the colonial period”.

The press release denounces “the double standards of the West” And “an empty and senseless action” from France “hastily organized to please the kyiv regime”. “Once again we are faced with the duplicity and Russophobia of our European adversaries,” is it also written.

>> War in Ukraine: how the memory of the Holodomor, this famine caused by Stalin, has shaped Ukrainian identity

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hailed a “historic decision” for his country. In their resolution, adopted Tuesday almost unanimously (168 votes against 2), the French deputies recognized the Holodomor as genocide, calling on the government to do the same, to meet the strong expectations of Kiev about this memory. painful, revived by the Russian military intervention in the country. The adopted text “officially recognizes the genocidal nature of the famine forced and planned by the Soviet authorities against the Ukrainian population in 1932 and 1933”.

In mid-December, the European Parliament had also qualified the Holodomor as genocide. Russia categorically denies this classification, citing the fact that the great famine had not only made Ukrainian victims, but also Russians, Kazakhs, and among other peoples.