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Russian President Vladimir Putin invoked World War II to justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine, saying in televised remarks last week that his offensive aimed to "denazify" the country — whose democratically elected president is Jewish, and lost relatives in the Holocaust. "The purpose of this operation is to protect people who for eight years now have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime," he said, according to an English translation from the Russian Mission in Geneva. "To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous...

1953 March 05 Joseph Stalin dies Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union since 1924, dies in Moscow. Ioseb Dzhugashvili was born in 1878 in Georgia, then part of the old Russian empire. The son of a drunk who beat him mercilessly and a pious washerwoman mother, Stalin learned Russian, which he spoke with a heavy accent all his life, in an Orthodox Church-run school. While studying to be a priest at Tiflis Theological Seminary, he began secretly reading Karl Marx and other left-wing revolutionary thinkers. In 1900, Stalin became active in revolutionary political activism, taking part in labor demonstrations...

By late 1933, the worst of the famine had run its course. There’s no definite estimate of how many people died. But most scholars agree that at least 2 million Ukrainians died of starvation between 1930 and 1933. However, during any famine, the number of people who die from starvation isn’t the best way to determine the total death toll. The stress of long-term hunger makes people more likely to develop deadly illnesses like typhus and cholera. These diseases were prevalent in Ukraine during the famine and killed millions of additional people.

After encircling the Soviet Red Army in late September 1941, Nazi forces captured Kyiv and promptly posted notices ordering Jews to gather near a place known as “Grandmother’s Ravine,” or “Babyn Yar” in local parlance. Days later, locals watched long columns of people shuffle past. On Sept. 29 and 30, SS-led forces gunned down nearly 34,000 Jews — not including children, who were often buried alive as Nazi policy forbade wasting bullets on them — and dumped them into the ravine. By the end of the war, some 100,000 dead, including thousands of Ukrainians and Roma, lay in the mass...

CNN)President Joe Biden will hold a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday afternoon "to discuss a range of topics, including upcoming diplomatic engagements with Russia," National Security Council spokesperson Emily Horne told CNN. The call was requested by Putin...

Between 1936 and 1938, Stalin’s infamous secret police agency, the NKVD, waged a ruthless campaign of terror against high-ranking Communist Party officials and ordinary citizens alike. Estimates of the death toll vary, but History.com points out that at least 750,000 people were executed during the Great Purge (also known as the Great Terror). Millions more were detained in the Gulag, a vast system of forced labor and prison camps. At the site in Odessa, Stalin’s enforcers “dug out pits in the garbage and threw these people in or shot them dead as they were standing there,” archaeologist Tetyana Samoylova tells...

You’ve probably never heard of Gareth Jones. You’ve certainly heard of the writer he inspired, and the classic dystopian novel that writer created. You were forced to read it, or at least the Cliff’s Notes, in high school. But shorn of its context, that novel lacks the full punch it could deliver. Mr. Jones (2019), starring Peter Sarsgaard and James Norton, directed by Oscar nominee Agnieszka Holland and written by Andrea Chalupa, provides that context in a must-see film. Mr. Jones is powerfully relevant today, even more than when it premiered in 2019. You have undoubtedly heard of “cancel culture,”...

What is the "Name of the Game? We are told the troops need to come home but it looks like they're going "home" to Saudi Arabia..... Raging rants against the ruler Assad of Syria, Iran and Russia coming out of Washington in recent years including President Trump's mouth.... Ukraine has been getting Russian energy but its needs to get good US energy like our liquid natural gas. So yes that friend of Texas energy interests Rick Perry Secretary of Energy in the game asking the POTUS to talk to the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky... I say let Zelensky testify to...

Is the New York Times "airbrushing" history again? It would seem so. On Saturday, November 22, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko presided over a commemoration in Kiev of the 75th anniversary of the famine genocide of 1932-1933 that took the lives of 7-10 million Ukrainians. Known as the Holodomor (Ukrainian for "murder by hunger"), it is one of the greatest mass murders in history, and one of the cruelest ... The New York Times prides itself on being the national "newspaper of record" and still carries its longtime motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print" in the upper left-hand corner...

Ukraine is marking the 85th anniversary of the Stalin-era famine, known as the Holodomor, in which millions of people died of starvation. The Holodomor took place in 1932 and 1933 as Soviet authorities forced peasants in Ukraine to join collective farms by requisitioning their grain and other food products. In a statement released on November 23, the U.S. State Department said the victims were "deliberately starved to death by the regime of Josef Stalin." Estimates of the famine's death toll range from 3 million to 7 million. Moscow denies any systematic effort to target Ukrainians, arguing a "poor harvest" at...

Oksana Ostapenko was 12 years old and facing death from hunger when a stranger saved her life by taking the girl into his family and sharing the last of their food. Today, aged 97, the Ukrainian's voice trembles when she recalls the terrible famine that hit her country in the 1930s due to policies enforced by Joseph Stalin's police. "They came and took away all our grain..." The death toll of the famine - known as the "Holodomor" in Ukrainian - remains debated among historians. But Kiev authorities estimate the number of those who died at around four million, or...

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Senate has adopted a resolution recognizing that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin committed genocide against the Ukrainian people in the early 1930s, when millions died in a horrific famine known as the Holodomor. The office of Republican Senator Rob Portman, who sponsored the bill, did not immediately get back to RFE/RL for comment. Asked for comment, the State Department referred to a 2017 statement that described the Holodomor as "one of the most atrocious acts of the 20th century. The "simple resolution" passed on October 3 commemorates the 85th anniversary of the famine of 1932-33. The Senate...

Moscow, April 13, Interfax - A prompt decision needs to be made on the burial of the remains of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin and on the transfer of the remains of Joseph Stalin to Georgia, Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of Chechnya, said. "If I was asked, I would make this decision today, without waiting until tomorrow. Why torture Lenin's dead body, clean it constantly, keep this mummy? Who needs it? He is not a holy person. I am firmly convinced that Lenin's remains should be buried and Stalin's remains should be sent to his homeland, to Georgia," he said in...

On Thursday, March 29, the US state of Massachusetts announced through its Ukrainian Embassy the state’s decision to recognize the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as genocide of the Ukrainian people. “Another American state joined the recognition of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine as a genocide against the Ukrainian people,” Massachusetts Governor Charles Baker stated in a corresponding proclamation. Currently, the Holodomor in Ukraine is recognized as genocide in the US states of Washington, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and now Massachusetts.

Russia reacted seriously to yesterday's Knesset bill to recognize the Ukrainian genocide in the 1930's advanced by Druze MK Akram Hasson (Kulanu) and marking the Holodomor ("to kill by starvation"), the mass famine in Ukraine between 1932-3 in which millions were killed. The Russian Embassy reacted by saying the bill "sadly distorts history". Meanwhile, the Russians are applying additional pressure on the media. Yesterday, Russian Deputy Ambassador to Israel Leonid Frolov spoke with Galei Tzahal's Michael Hauser Tov. Frolov was asked whether this law intensifies sensitivities while security coordination between Jerusalem and Moscow regarding Iran and Syria is at its...

“Ukraine is at War,” states Herman Pirchner, Jr., President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C. The AFPC is a much needed Conservative alternative to the Council on Foreign Relations, which although much larger, exhibits too many Globalist themes and aims while diminishing America’s presence on the world stage. President Pirchner explains in his just released treatise that sanctions by the Obama administration and the EU have done little to tamp down Vladimir Putin’s campaign of aggression known as “hybrid warfare.” (1) Russia’s persistence in its Ukraine offensive is deeply rooted in the bloody history of the Ukraine...

Communist persecution and the deliberate famine Stalin engineered in Ukraine: In only a few years, some 6-7 million Ukrainians perished in what they call the Holodomor. Over the years we have been overwhelmed with extraordinary movies and documentaries about the Holocaust and the various atrocities of Nazi Germany. These horrific crimes against humanity deserve to be examined over and over again so they are never repeated. But we see so little about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) which killed more people than Hitler did, rivaled the repressive state apparatus of Nazi Germany, and easily outlasted the so-called Thousand-Year...

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has taken part in ceremonies to commemorate the millions who died of famine under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Poroshenko attended a ceremony in the capital, Kyiv, at the museum dedicated to the famine, or Holodomor. A minute of silence was also held across Ukraine. November 28 has been marked in Ukraine as the day to commemorate the victims of the Holodomor since 2006. The famine took place in 1932 and 1933 as Soviet leader Stalin's police forced peasants in Ukraine to join collective farms by requisitioning their grain and other foodstuffs. It is estimated that up...

History, Identity and Holodomor Denial: Russia’s continued assault on Ukraine Holodomor Memorial in Washington D.C. as final touches are made in preparation for its official opening on November 7. (State Dept./D.A. Peterson) 2015/11/07 • Analysis & Opinion, History, News, Op-ed On Saturday November 7, a long-awaited memorial to a little-known modern genocide will be dedicated in Washington D.C. It will be accompanied by an exhibit at Union Station aimed at raising awareness among Americans of what Ukrainians call the Holodomor, literally “death by hunger,” an engineered famine which took the lives of anywhere from 4 to 10 million Ukrainians in...

When Ukraine resisted Soviet attempts at collectivization in the 1920s and '30s, the Soviet Union under Stalin used labor camps, executions, and starvation: Holodomor Released known picture of peasant uprisings before the Famine. Photos electronic archive Ukrainian liberation movement Removing vegetables from the villagers. The village of Novo-Red History of the Security Service of Ukraine in cooperation with the Center for Studies of the liberation movement laid out in free access to a unique picture of the peasant uprising that preceded the Great Famine and Genocide diaries of eyewitnesses. Now you can view and download the electronic archive of the...