At the suggestion of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Borys Tarasiuk the members of the sitting of CIS foreign offices’ ministers moved to the agenda the issue of acknowledging the Ukrainian famine of 1930s genocide of the Ukrainian nation.

The Minister propounded the issue at the outset of the Friday sitting in Moscow. It should be recalled that the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of December, 9 1948 states that genocide means any acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. The acts comprise killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, arranged by the Bolshevik regime, lead to the death of, by different estimate, 3 to 7 million people. In 1988 the Congress of the USA acknowledged the famine genocide. Similar appraisal was given by the parliaments of Australia, Canada, Hungary, Poland and Lithuania.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Sergei Lavrov called upon the Ukrainian side not to introduce political tenor to the problem.

Voting ended in the Ukrainian proposal backed by Georgia, Moldova and Azerbaijan. Belarus, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan took the opposite stance. Three more countries – Kazakhstan, Armenia and Turkmenistan – abstained from voting.

On account of the voting the head of the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs assured the delegates that Ukraine will pursue its attempts to acknowledge the famine genocide. Though this will take place on a higher level, for instance, at a UN session.