The Ukrainian government thanked, in a note sent to Lusa, the solidarity of Portugal for having approved, in 2017, a resolution that described the “Holodomor” as genocide, the famine that 90 years ago killed millions in Ukraine.
This message from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in kyiv, sent on Friday, was motivated by the fact that this Saturday is commemorated in Ukraine: the 90th anniversary of the great famine caused by Stalin in the country, when he ordered the confiscation of the country’s crops. in the name of the collectivization of the land.
“Tomorrow (this Saturday), November 26, Ukraine remembers the victims of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 (…) In March 2017, the parliament of the Portuguese Republic approved resolution no. 233/XIII [intitulada] ‘Recognition of the Holodomor: The Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine’, which classifies the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as a genocide of the Ukrainian people,” an official source from the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said in a note sent to Lusa.
The message from the kyiv Government even names some Portuguese municipalities that joined the initiative, such as “Grândola, Alcanena, Lagos, Águeda, Abrantes and Braga”, and that “recognized the fact of genocide”.
“We highly appreciate and respect the solidarity of the parliament and the Portuguese people with the Ukrainians, who suffered one of the greatest national tragedies in their history between 1932 and 1933”, reads the text on the “Holodomor”, which in Ukrainian means precisely “extermination by hunger” and only in that first winter caused more than 3.5 million deaths in the country.
Today will be the first of four Saturdays in November that Ukraine will mark, with a Day of Remembrance, the beginning of the Holodomor, also known as “The Great Famine” or “The Famine-Terror” of the Soviet regime era.
According to the Holodomor Museum, located in kyiv, so far only 16 states, apart from Ukraine, have officially recognized the great famine as genocide: Australia, Ecuador, Estonia, Canada, Colombia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico. , Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, the United States and the Vatican. Some other countries, such as Argentina, Chile and Spain, condemned it as “an act of extermination.”
The 17 have now been joined by two more, Romania and Ireland, whose parliaments this week approved resolutions to that effect. They should be followed by at least one more, Germany, which has already announced for next Wednesday that the issue will be debated and voted on in the lower house of its parliament (Bundestag).
Scholarly opinion remains divided on whether the great famine of 1932-1933 constituted “genocide”, the main question being whether Stalin intended to kill Ukrainians to quell an independence movement against the Soviet Union, or whether the famine was mainly the result of the combination of official incompetence and natural conditions.
In the note sent to Lusa, the MNE of Ukraine thanks the country one more time, regarding the help it has provided since Russia invaded it on February 24 of this year, causing an as yet undetermined number of deaths and injuries and millions of wounded internally. displaced persons and refugees in other European countries.
“We thank Portugal for its solidarity with the Ukrainian people in defending its independence and territorial integrity and for sharing the legitimate aspirations of the Ukrainian people to be part of a united Europe, within the framework of the values and principles of defending democracy. , the peace and prosperity of the peoples”, concludes the text.
Source: Observadora
