Pope Francis said on Wednesday that Ukrainians today are experiencing a “martyrdom of suffering”, comparing the war in Ukraine to the “horrible genocide” of the 1930s, when Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the former Soviet republic to be starved to death, Reuters reported.

Addressing thousands of believers in St. Peter’s Square during his weekly audience, the Sovereign Pontiff recalled the Holodomor, the starvation of millions of Ukrainians in the winter of 1932-1933 by order of Joseph Stalin.

“This Saturday marks the anniversary of the horrifying Holodomor-genocide, the extermination by hunger of 1932-1933, artificially created by Stalin,” Pope Francis said.

“We pray for the victims of this genocide and for many Ukrainians – children, women, and the elderly, who today accept the martyrdom of suffering,” he added.

For hundreds of years, the Ukrainian language, culture and identity were suppressed during the period when the territory was part of Russia, first the tsarist empire and then the Soviet Union.

The Russian occupying forces removed the monument to the victims of the Holodomor from the city of Mariupol, which they captured in mid-May, saying that it would be dismantled and turned into building materials.

What is the Holodomor referred to by Pope Francis

The Holodomor, which historians often call the “forgotten Holocaust” of the 20th century, also known as the “Famine of Terror” or the “Great Famine” in Ukraine, killed 3.5-5 million Ukrainians.

But estimates of the actual death toll vary widely, with a joint UN declaration signed by 25 member states in 2003 putting the death toll at between 7 and 10 million.

The famine was organized by the Soviet authorities at the behest of Joseph Stalin, who ordered all agricultural products to be removed from the territory of Ukraine and people left to starve as part of his campaign to suppress the Ukrainian independence movement.

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion on February 24, Pope Francis has mentioned the war in Ukraine in almost all of his public speeches, but has occasionally come under fire for some of his comments.

For example, in a May interview with a Jesuit publication, he said that the war of aggression launched by Vladimir Putin “may have been somehow provoked.”

“We don’t see all the drama that unfolded behind this war, which may have been somehow provoked or not warned,” the sovereign pontiff said. To a rhetorical question about whether he is pro-Putin, he answered that “no, no. It would be simplistic and incorrect to say so.”

Another example of this came in August, when Pope Francis named Daria Dugin, the daughter of Russian ultranationalist Oleksandr Dugin, an “innocent” victim of war after she died in a car bomb attack outside Moscow.

His comment was sharply criticized by Ukraine’s ambassador to the Vatican.