Why Ukrainians fear the Russians

The Ukrainian word ‘Holodomor’ meaning ‘death by hunger’ is not as well known in the West as the word ‘Holocaust’, but it should be. In 1933, a decade before the Nazis began to deliberately murder some six million European Jews, Stalin’s Soviet regime starved to death – equally deliberately – some four million men, women and children in the Ukraine.

That this epic crime has largely disappeared from public memory, mostly forgotten except by historians and the Ukrainian diaspora, is partly down to the second catastrophe that overwhelmed Ukraine in 1941-45 with its invasion and conquest by Hitler’s armies. This terrible episode was also successfully covered up and concealed from the world by both Stalin’s regime and its western apologists. The shining exceptions were two brave British journalists: Gareth Jones of the Times and Malcolm Muggeridge of the Manchester Guardian.

Jones – whose story was told in the 2019 movie ‘Mr Jones’, starring James Norton as the intrepid Welsh-born reporter – made three journeys through the famine-stricken Ukraine at the height of the Holodomor.