This commentary is by Barbara Felitti, a resident of Huntington who retired after 28 years with the Montpelier-based Institute for Sustainable Communities. She lived and worked in Ukraine from 2005 to 2008 on a USAID-funded democracy project following the Orange Revolution, and was based in Kyiv. From 1993 to 2005, she worked extensively on projects in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.
The last Saturday of November was Holodomor Remembrance Day in Ukraine. Holodomor in Ukrainian means “death by hunger.”
The annual remembrance commemorates millions of people who died in 1932-33 from Soviet policies under Stalin that created a manmade famine.
Ukraine is known as the “breadbasket of Europe” but during the Holodomor, food was withheld from the very people growing it. Ukrainian grain was exported to the central government, and Ukrainians were left to starve. A law made it a crime punishable by imprisonment or death for any Ukrainian, children included, to glean fields for stalks of wheat left after the harvest because that was theft of “state property.”
These deliberate actions by Soviet leaders were an attempt to use starvation to suppress Ukrainian independence and prevent rebellions by farmers who resisted collectivization (takeover of their farms and livestock by the Soviet government). Because of imprecise records, the estimated number of deaths ranges from 3.5 million to 7 million people.
Now, in 2022, Russia is seeking to break Ukrainian spirit and force the country into submission through massive countrywide bombings of civilian infrastructure affecting heat, light and water. Russian occupiers in the city of Mariupol removed a Holodomor memorial because it was deemed to be “a symbol of political misinformation.”
As under Stalin, Russia is trying to break Ukrainian spirit and suppress Ukrainian nationalism. In the words of Ukraine’s culture minister Oleksandr Tkachenko, “such acts signifies that the current Russian regime is a true successor to the one guilty of crimes against humanity and the Ukrainian people.”
Imagine going through a Vermont winter with no heat, water or electricity or having these for only a few hours a day and you will have a sense of what Ukrainians are experiencing now and will continue to experience over the upcoming winter months. Yet these and other hardships have not changed the determination of my Ukrainian friends to be free of Russian influence and integrated more fully with Europe. In their Thanksgiving messages to me, they expressed tremendous gratitude for U.S. support against Russia’s aggression.
It is vital that this support remains unwavering.
Russia has violated all agreements it signed related to Ukrainian sovereignty — the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, and both the 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements.
So we need to fully respect and support Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s peace proposal — return of all occupied lands, reparations for damages, and prosecution of war crimes. Without this, there can be no just and lasting peace.