The resolution was presented to the Bundestag (lower house of parliament) by the three parties in the government coalition led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the main opposition bloc.

After a debate in which the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany took part, the resolution was approved by a large majority, with two other opposition parties abstaining.

The vote came just days after Ukraine celebrated the 90th anniversary of the start of the famine.

Holodomor means mass extermination of Ukrainians by starvation and results from the fusion of the words “holod”, hunger, and “mor”, from the verb moryty, which means to exhaust, to let suffer in order to intervene, to kill by deprivation.

The resolution states that “the mass starvation deaths were not the result of a bad harvest; the political leadership of the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin was responsible for it”. The text adds that Ukrainians expressed a “deep distrust” of Stalin, of Georgian origin, and that “all of Ukraine was hit by hunger and repression, and not just the grain-producing areas”.

“From a current perspective, a historical and political classification of genocide is evident,” the resolution says. “The German parliament shares this classification.”

“This horror has its origins in the Kremlin – there the dictator made the cruel decision to promote forced collectivization and cause famine,” Robin Wagner, MP for the Greens, one of the coalition parties, told the House. in power.

“And the death by starvation was also aimed at the repression of Ukrainian national identity, Ukrainian culture and language,” he added, quoted by the Associated Press (AP) news agency.

Wagner also felt that “parallels with the present are unacceptable”, an aspect also underlined by other speakers nine months after the invasion of Ukraine by neighboring Russia.

Scholars remain divided on whether the so-called ‘Great Famine’ constituted genocide, with the main issue relating to Stalin’s intention to intentionally kill Ukrainians in an effort to suppress an independence movement against the ‘Soviet Union, or if the famine was destined the cause was official incompetence, coupled with unfavorable natural conditions.

According to the Holodomor Museum in kyiv, 16 countries other than Ukraine have already recognized the famine as genocide: Australia, Ecuador, Estonia, Canada, Colombia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal , United States United States and Vatican. Other countries, including Argentina, Chile and Spain, have condemned an “act of extermination”.

Last week, Pope Francis linked the current suffering of Ukrainians to the “artificial genocide caused by Stalin” in the 1930s.