Ninety years ago, millions perished in Ukraine in a manufactured famine under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that many in the country call genocide.
For Ganna Pertchuk, the Russian invasion is a case of history repeating itself.
At the tall candle-shaped Holodomor (Ukrainian for death by starvation) memorial center in central Kyiv, a dozen Orthodox priests in black and silver robes on Saturday gathered for a religious ceremony for the victims of the famine.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The event was held outdoors despite sub-zero temperatures.
Before starting the ceremony, Ukrainian Orthodox Church Patriarch Filaret, 93, laid a wreath of red carnations at the monument with a statue of an emaciated girl clutching some stalks of wheat against her chest.
“We pray for those who perished in the famine,” he said. “The Holodomor was not a result of a bad harvest, but the targeted extermination of the Ukrainian people.”
“What happened in the 1930s was genocide and what is happening now is also genocide,” said Pertchuk, a pensioner, who attended the ceremony. “The parallels are very clear.”
Ukraine is known as the breadbasket of Europe for its abundant wheat crops, a product of its rich, black soil, but under Soviet rule it lost between 4 and 8 million citizens during the 1932-1933 famine. Some researchers put the figure even higher.
While some historians say that the famine was planned and exacerbated by Stalin to quash an independence movement, others say it was a result of rapid Soviet industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture.
Ukraine officially considers it a “genocide,” along with a number of Western countries, a label that Moscow vehemently rejects.
Pertchuk, like many Ukrainians has heard horror stories from family members.
Her mother-in-law, remembered as a young girl hiding with her family in a village near Kyiv so “that she wasn’t eaten up,” Pertchuk said, speaking of a famine that fueled rare cases of cannibalism.
“Imagine the horror,” the 61-year-old former nurse said, with tears in her eyes.
“It was an artificial genocidal famine,” priest Oleksandr Shmurygin, 38, said. “Now when we experience this massive unprovoked war of Russia against Ukraine, we see history repeating itself.” Among those gathered to commemorate the victims of the famine was lawyer Andryi Savchuk, who spoke of its “irreparable” loss for Ukraine.
“Stalin’s system, the repressive state, wanted to destroy Ukraine as a nation,” he said. “Today we see that the efforts made by Stalin are continued by [Russian President Vladimir] Putin.”
“At that time, they wanted to exterminate Ukrainians through famine. Today, they are exterminating us with heavy weapons,” Savchuk said.
However, just as Ukrainians held on in the 1930s, so they would against Moscow today, he said.
“We have an unyielding will and confidence, and the whole world is with us,” he said.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS