They were fighting the Russians.
Ultimately, although Stalin’s policies resulted in the deaths of millions, it failed to crush Ukrainian aspirations for autonomy, and in the long run, they may actually have backfired. “Famine often achieves a socio-economic or military purpose, such as transferring land possession or clearing an area of population, since most flee rather than die,” famine historian de Waal says. “But politically and ideologically it is more often counterproductive for its perpetrators. As in the case of Ukraine it generated so much hatred and resentment that it solidified Ukrainian nationalism.”
https://www.history.com/articles/ukrainian-famine-stalin
It's very telling that you have to go back to the 1930's Soviet Union to get content to try to blame on 2020s Russia. Russians were killed by Stalin too along with other ethnicities. Lots of people hate Stalin - he killed 20 million people.
FROM WIKI:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin
Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the archival revelations, some historians estimated that the numbers killed by Stalin's regime were 20 million or higher.[5][6][7] After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives was declassified and researchers were allowed to study it. This contained official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953),[8][9][10][11][12] around 1.5 to 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag,[13][14][15] some 390,000[16] deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s,[17] with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.[18] According to historian Stephen Wheatcroft, approximately 1 million of these deaths were "purposive" while the rest happened through neglect and irresponsibility.[2] The deaths of at least 5.5 to 6.5 million[19] persons in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 are sometimes included with the victims of the Stalin era.[2][20]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
While most scholars are in consensus that the main cause of the famine was largely man-made, it remains in dispute whether the Holodomor was intentional and whether it was directed at Ukrainians and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture. A middle position is that the initial causes of the famine were an unintentional byproduct of the process of collectivization but once it set in, starvation was selectively weaponized and the famine was "instrumentalized" and amplified against Ukrainians as a means to punish Ukrainians for resisting Soviet policies and to suppress their nationalist sentiments.