KIEV, April 20 (RIA Novosti) - Ukraine wants a meeting of former Soviet republics to discuss the millions of deaths from famine in the 1930s, which it blames on Moscow and calls genocide, its foreign minister said Thursday.
"We have not so far raised this issue in the CIS format. I think we will do it tomorrow," Borys Tarasyuk said, speaking of a meeting of foreign ministers of the Commonwealth of Independent States, to take place in Moscow.
Ukraine has accused the rulers of Soviet Russia of deliberately causing the famine, known as Holodomor, in Ukraine in 1932-1933.
Largely agrarian Ukraine was among the regions worst affected by the famine, which is blamed on a policy of collectivization, or enforcing collective farming.
Bolshevik authorities had sent armed units across the state to confiscate effectively all grain from farmers in 1932 despite a decline in output at the time.
The famine, which also affected other regions of the former Soviet Union, inflicted a heavy death toll. Figures vary dramatically and are difficult to calculate as many people across the newly formed Soviet state also died from typhoid and other infectious diseases that accompanied mass migration triggered by World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the ensuing civil war.
Tarasyuk said that so far Russia had failed to respond enthusiastically to Ukraine's Holodomor-related claims.
