Russia described Saturday as “anti-Russian fervor” the vote in France’s National Assembly to recognize the Holodomor, the great famine caused by the Soviet authorities in Ukraine in the early 1930s, as genocide, which caused millions of deaths, AFP reported.

“The anti-Russian fervor of the French deputies is all the more disgusting because France itself has not yet closed the page of its crimes of the colonial period,” Russian diplomacy spokeswoman Maria Zakharova emphasized in a statement. , we face the duplicity and Russophobia of our European opponents,” added Zakharova.

She condemned the “double standards of the “collective West” and the empty and senseless action” of France, “hastily organized to please the Kyiv regime.”

The National Assembly of France on Tuesday recognized the Holodomor, which was caused by the Soviet authorities in the early 1930s in Ukraine and resulted in the deaths of several million people, as a genocide. In a resolution adopted almost unanimously (168 votes “for” and 2 “against”), French MPs called on the government to recognize the Holodomor as genocide in order to meet Kyiv’s expectations regarding this painful topic, which has been revived since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. .

The President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi welcomed the vote. “Thank you to the members of the National Assembly for this historic decision,” Volodymyr Zelenskyy responded on Twitter in French shortly after the vote.

The adopted text “officially recognizes the genocidal nature of the famine imposed and planned by the Soviet authorities on the Ukrainian population in 1932 and 1933.” He “condemns” these actions and “declares the support of the Ukrainian people in their desire to recognize the mass crimes committed against them by the Soviet regime.”

The National Assembly suggests that the French government accept this qualification of genocide and asks it to “encourage in the international arena free access to archives related to the Holodomor, especially in the Russian Federation,” in order to document the facts.

Nicknamed “the granary of Europe” for the fertility of its black soil, Ukraine lost several million inhabitants during the Great Famine of 1932-1933 amid the collectivization of agricultural land, organized, according to historians, by Stalin to suppress any aspirations for independence. this country, then a Soviet republic.

In mid-December, the European Parliament qualified the Holodomor as genocide.

As for Russia, it categorically refuses such a classification, referring to the fact that the great famine of the 1930s brought victims not only to Ukrainians, but also to Russians, Kazakhs and other peoples. (Agerpress)