Students of the Volodymyr Dahl East Ukrainian National University attended the presentation of the collection “International Recognition of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as Genocide of the Ukrainian People”, which took place at the media center of the Directorate General for Foreign Missions. The collection includes documents on the recognition of the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people, which were adopted by the parliaments of foreign countries and international organizations after February 24, 2022.
The presentation began with a minute of silence to honor the memory of the Holodomor victims.
Ukrainian diplomat and politician, Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the Council of Europe Borys Tarasiuk reflected on the importance of this book for the Ukrainian people: “In my speech, I will draw an equal sign between the Stalinist Holodomor and the behavior of Putin’s Russia, which unleashed a war against the Ukrainian people.” The diplomat emphasized that the Holodomor event does not leave representatives of international organizations indifferent. On October 12, 2023, with the assistance of the Ukrainian delegation, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution recognizing the Holodomor as an act of genocide designed to break the foundation of the Ukrainian nation.
The collection was compiled by Ambassador at Large of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Ihor Ostash. In his speech, he noted: “We can see that from 1993 to 2018, in 25 years, 15 countries recognized the Holodomor as genocide, and the situation changed radically after February 24, 2022, after the unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
This brutal war provoked a process of rethinking the history of the Moscow regime’s inhuman atrocities during the famine, and during this time 16 countries have approved the decision to recognize the 1932-1933 famine as genocide.”
The event also remembered Gareth Johnson, a Welsh journalist who was the first to report on the mass famine in the USSR, including the Holodomor, in the Western press under his own name. His reports were published, among others, in The Guardian and The New York Post.
Nataliia Kandul, 1st year student majoring in Journalism