LONDON, May 26. /TASS/. The move by the British House of Commons to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people is all politics, the Russian embassy in London said in a statement.
"We have duly noted yet another distasteful step taken on May 25 by the House of Commons of the UK Parliament in its anti-Russian frenzy. British MPs seem to be going out of their way to gratify the Kiev regime. This time, they dusted off the topic of the collective Soviet tragedy of the famine of the 1930s, which the admirers of Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, who have seized power in Kiev, have been trying to opportunistically ‘privatize’ for many years. The objective of the approved motion on the ‘holodomor’ is self-explanatory - to attempt to desecrate the common memory of Russian and Ukrainian peoples and pull them apart. This is an exclusively political step that has no bearing on historical facts," the statement reads.
"Meanwhile, London seems to be less than enthusiastic about giving a fair assessment to similar tragedies that took place in the different parts of the British Empire," the embassy added.
Earlier on Thursday, the House of Commons approved a motion by member of the ruling Conservative Party Pauline Latham to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide against Ukrainians. Only about two dozen parliament members took part in the vote. Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the British Foreign Office Leo Docherty, who was present during discussions of the document that is not legally binding, stated that the British government would not recognize the mass famine of the early 1930s as the genocide of Ukrainians because the issue falls under the authority of the judicial authorities.
A large-scale famine broke out in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, affecting not only Ukraine but also Belarus, the North Caucasus, the Volga Region, the Southern Urals, Western Siberia and Kazakhstan and causing considerable loss of life (between two mln and eight mln people, according to various estimates). In 2006, under President Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada (parliament) passed a law establishing the concept of the Holodomor as the genocide of Ukrainians.