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Along with the blockading of ports, this is using food as a weapon of war-a war crime. Last week, we saw vivid footage of his militias setting fire to fields, scorching the earth and reducing crops to ash. Does that sound familiar? Today, in a mirror image of Stalin, it is Putin committing food terrorism by purposefully destroying Ukraine’s agricultural infrastructure and stealing Ukrainian grain and agricultural machinery. The Holodomor, also known as the Terror Famine, was caused by a dictator who wanted to replace Ukraine’s small farms with state-owned collectives and punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to his totalitarian authority.
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His decree of “Five Stalks of Grain” stated that anyone, even a child, caught taking produce from a collective field, could be shot or imprisoned for stealing socialist property. As Ukrainians resorted to eating grass, acorns and even cats and dogs, Stalin banned any reference to famine. While people were starving to death, the Soviet state stole over 4 million tonnes of Ukraine’s grain, enough to meet the needs of 12 million people in a year. It seems especially cruel and perverse to have used food as a genocidal weapon in the breadbasket of Europe. The Holodomor was methodically planned and executed by denying the producers of the food the sustenance necessary for survival. Stalin’s Holodomor, like Putin’s today, was an entirely man-made catastrophe, leading to anything from 3.5 to 5 million deaths and is regarded by many historians as a genocide. Putin’s deluded idea that these brave people would now line the streets with flowers, cheering the new imperial occupation and the reconquest of their country, simply beggars belief.Īn abiding memory from that time is of conversations with families who had personally experienced Stalin’s Holodomor, which translates to “death by hunger”, and had occurred 50 years earlier from 1932 to 1933. They proudly held aloft their blue and yellow flags of defiance.
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It was inspiring to watch people lay flowers each day at the doors of churches closed by Stalin 40 years earlier. In 1988, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, I visited Ukraine and met political and religious leaders, some of whom had spent nearly two decades in the Kremlin’s prison camps. The war’s effects reverberate around the globe: food price inflation and supply disruptions from the war in Ukraine have left millions, in Africa especially, vulnerable to famine and starvation. This debate is also taking place against a backdrop of mass displacements, thousands of deaths and devastation, all unleashed by Putin’s war on Ukraine, with Europe left facing its worst energy and economic crisis since the 1940s. Beware Putin, broken promises, blackmail and Potemkin village scams. Turkey has proposed that Russia allows Ukrainian grain ships to leave Odessa on designated routes-grain corridors-so long as checks are made that the ships are not carrying arms. Our debate is taking place as Russia, Iran, and Turkey, with its responsibility under the 1936 Montreux convention for naval traffic entering the Black Sea, have been meeting in Tehran. I draw attention to my non-financial interests, including being a patron of the Coalition for Genocide Response and co-chair of the APPG on Eritrea. I couple those thanks with my thanks to the House of Lords Library, Dr Ewelina Ochab, the World Bank and others who have provided us with such excellent briefing material. My Lords, in opening today’s debate I should like to thank all noble Lords who are going to take part, especially the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, who will make his maiden speech.