ZELENSKY CALLS ON ISRAEL TO RECOGNIZE HOLODOMOR AS GENOCIDE AGAINST UKRAINIAN PEOPLE
August 19, 2019
The President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people, reports Interfax-Ukraine.
"I appealed to the Israeli side to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide of the Ukrainian people," Zelensky said at a briefing on Monday after bilateral talks with Netanyahu.
"Today, together with Prime Minister Netanyahu, we will visit Babi Yar and honor the victims of mass shootings in Babi Yar and the Holocaust. All these bitter moments of our common history should unite us with the hope for a bright future and the impossibility of repeating such tragedies," Zelensky added.
Babi Yar is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and a site of massacres carried out by German forces during their campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II.
The Holodomor was a man-made famine of Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s that claimed the lives of millions of Ukrainians.
In November 2015, the Ukrainian Institute for Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences released data showing that Ukraine lost 13 percent of its entire population due to high mortality rate in 1932-1934 as a result of Holodomor (famine).
