French Senate recognizes the Holodomor as genocide

On Wednesday, the French Parliament’s Upper House – the Senate – adopted a resolution recognizing the 1932-1933 Holodomor in Ukraine as genocide, according to the Senate’s website.

An overwhelming majority of senators, 327, supported the motion to adopt the resolution, and 16 voted against it, of whom 15 represent the Communist, Republican, Citizen and Ecologist group.

By this resolution, the Senate invites the French Government to:

• officially recognize the starvation, deportation and extermination methodically organized by the Soviet authorities against millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933 as genocide; and
• publicly condemn the genocide committed by the Soviet authorities against the Ukrainian rural population in 1932 and 1933.

The authors of the resolution regret that the Russian authorities now refute the existence of extermination by starvation – or Holodomor – of several million Ukrainians methodically organized by the Soviet regime between 1932 and 1933.

For the authors of the text, the Holodomor must be recognized as genocide regarding its objectives of negating Ukrainian identity and the disappearance of the Ukrainian nation.

“Current events in Ukraine indeed seem to demonstrate the parallelism between the Holodomor and Putin’s objective of the negation of Ukrainian identity and the disappearance of the Ukrainian nation,” the authors say in the Statement of Reasons for the motion. “There is indeed no doubt that the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia – as was the case after the Holodomor in order to Russify them – the systematic destruction of energy infrastructures ahead of an icy winter, large-scale rape and torture, looting and destruction of cultural institutions aim at terrorizing the population in a sinister echo of the methods already used 90 years ago.”

This recognition of the Holodomor as genocide aims at proclaiming France’s unfailing attachment to respect for the dignity of a human being, expressing its support for the Ukrainian people and preventing such actions in the future.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky called the Senate’s decision to adopt the resolution “historic.” “Another important step on the way to restoring historical justice and perpetuating the memory of millions of Ukrainians tortured to death by hunger,” the President tweeted.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba also used “historic” in his tweet. “I am grateful to French senators for this historic vote which restores justice and honors the memory of millions of victims. Such crimes should never repeat and never be forgotten.”

On March 28, a resolution recognizing the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as genocide of the Ukrainian people was adopted by the National Assembly – the Lower House of the French Parliament.